


i could stop dreaming

by epiproctan



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Anal Sex, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Crying, F/M, Fix-It, Friendship, Getting Back Together, Love Confessions, M/M, Minor Hunk/Pidge | Katie Holt, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Panic Attacks, Past Curtis/Shiro (Voltron), Post-Canon, Post-War, Recreational Drug Use, Reunions, Sexual Content, Sharing a Bed, Space Road Trip
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-23
Updated: 2019-04-18
Packaged: 2019-10-14 20:11:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 44,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17515208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epiproctan/pseuds/epiproctan
Summary: The divorce is new. The sense that something is missing from Shiro’s life is not. Despite Pidge’s insistence, he’s not convinced that a space road trip is the cure for this, especially when it forces him to reopen doors from his past he would’ve rather left closed. But even Shiro’s reluctance to reunite with an old friend can’t stop the team from pursuing a new revelation:The Lions are still out there. And they might just have company.A story about finding the things you’ve lost and holding on to the things you have.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this is my ode to an amazing show that deserved better
> 
> thank you as always to [moth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flyingisland/pseuds/flyingisland) for betaing
> 
> [title song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=222iz7UY_6E)

Two years. 

The marriage lasted two years and it comes as absolutely no shock when Shiro discovers the divorce papers, already organized into a neat folder and signed, on the home screen of his tablet. He doesn’t get upset. He doesn’t cry. He doesn’t even consider calling Curtis’s name through the echoey house and asking what these are, or what this means. He doesn’t reflect on at what points things might have taken a turn for the distant between them, or what he did wrong, or if there’s any part of their relationship that can still be salvaged from the smoking wreckage. He just sits down with a sigh so quiet it could be the wind outside and traces his name onto the pages over and over. 

_ Takashi Shirogane. Takashi Shirogane. Takashi Shirogane. _

“Hey Shiro,” chirps Pidge’s voice through the video screen. “You look like you’ve seen better days.”

“Are you busy?” Shiro asks. 

“Never too busy for you.”

Hunk’s restaurant is packed, but he sits down with them when he brings their drinks. Shiro takes a sip of his cocktail and splutters. It smells more strongly of vodka than of any of the other ingredients listed under its name on the menu. 

“Divorce, huh?” Hunk asks, pushing the entire plate of mozzarella sticks in his direction. Shiro’s been on a diet since his lifestyle became more sedentary, but he figures tonight of all nights he deserves it. He grabs one. “Not to be rude but I can’t say I’m surprised.”

Pidge hums her agreement as she double dips into the marinara sauce. Hunk doesn’t even have mozzarella sticks on the menu, but he makes them without asking when he hears Pidge is coming by. 

“I’m not either,” Shiro admits. It’s been a long time coming. Doomed from the start, if he’s to be completely honest with himself. While trying the whole  _ If you get too worried about what could go wrong, you might miss a chance to do something great _ bit he’d somehow lost the  _ patience yields focus _ along the way. 

“Where are you gonna go?” Hunk asks. “Unless you’re keeping the house...which knowing you I don’t think you are.”

Shiro shrugs, mentally shuffles through his options. He does have them, but none of them sound appealing. Of course, neither does overstaying his welcome in a failed marriage. “Back to Garrison housing, I guess.” 

“You could stay at Lance’s,” Pidge pipes up. 

Hunk makes a face. Shiro can feel the echo of it on his own features and he tries to rein it in out of politeness, but he knows they’re all far too aware of why that’s probably not a good place for a recently divorced man to end up. He takes another long swig of his drink. The orange juice in it isn’t enough to make it not taste like rubbing alcohol, but Shiro thinks he probably deserves the burn.

“You’ll figure it out,” Hunk says. “Navigating a divorce should be easy after everything you’ve been through.” 

It should be easy, and it is easy. Too easy. Shiro had thought when the time came that it would hurt somewhere. That he’d feel it as an ache in his chest or a rolling in his gut. At least for a few days, a few sleepless nights. But right now he mostly just feels the same as the nothing that he’s trained himself to feel for so long. Maybe he’ll wake up in the morning and it’ll all crash over him at once, tsunami-like and suffocating. But tonight the ache of old battle scars hurts more than his emotions. This isn’t an uncommon state to find himself in. 

Probably why he’s down a husband. But that’s more than enough self-reflection for one night. He turns to his glass again. 

“I’m gonna head back to the kitchen,” Hunk says. He eyes Shiro’s empty drink. “I’ll make sure we get another one of those sent out to you.”

He goes and leaves Shiro absently picking breadcrumbs off fried cheese in his wake. Shiro knows Pidge is eyeing him scrutinizingly, but part of him doesn’t want to hear what too-logical thing she has to say right now. He knows it’s immature, but immaturity is a luxury he’s rarely ever allowed himself in the past.

“You know,” she starts, and for the first time today Shiro’s stomach twists. “You could always go find—”

“Pidge,” he says sharply, and they both know that’s the final word. 

The papers have barely gone through before Shiro has someone else in his bed. It’s not entirely like him, and he doesn’t really register how or why it happens. He’s never had the time for flirting and one-night stands before, but now he has nothing but time in between the 65 hours that he spends at his desk a week and sleeping. 

The first guy is a young officer at the Garrison, and Shiro starts to wonder if it’s the uniform that does it for him. The way that the shoulders come so square and the cinch of the belt narrow at the waist. He’s Shiro’s type, except for the fact that he isn’t. It’s like watching the same comfortable movie on repeat. Like listening to a playlist full of the same song, a dozen remixes too similar to be titled something different. 

But he has a mouth, and he has warm arms, and he’s into Shiro. Maybe that’s Shiro’s type. 

It seems to be, because he’s gone and done in less than a week, and replaced by a doppelganger. Then there’s the refugee from planet Hylfa, humanoid enough that Shiro barely thinks about it twice before it’s happening. He’s never slept with an alien before. 

Shiro’s never considered himself a hedonist in this sense. He’s always been vaguely aware that he has admirers of many kinds. He humbly tries not to phrase that as “people would line up to sleep with him” but these days that’s proving truer than not. It doesn’t feel right. Shiro has never had an interest in hooking up. But he’s also never had an interest in divorces. And he’s never had an interest in the coldness of his bed at night, or the deep dark hole in his heart that he’s become so practiced at ignoring that he manages to convince himself it doesn’t exist more often than he doesn’t. 

Above all else, he doesn’t know what he’s looking for. It’s not this, whatever  _ this _ is. It was Curtis until it wasn’t. Curtis was handsome and warm and supportive. He knew about Shiro’s pain. He shared Shiro’s experiences of war, of stars, of loss. He was there in the middle of the night when Shiro woke screaming. He massaged Shiro’s shoulder when it ached under the weight of his prosthetic. He held Shiro when the pain threatened to make itself into the black hole that would suck him in if he didn’t have a hand to grab onto. 

It wasn’t that Shiro didn’t love Curtis. Of course, he did. And of course, he had been happy with him. 

But now he’s not happy, and with half a dozen other people. And why? Shiro could have it all. Anything he’s ever wanted. The beautiful men. An enormous house. A gorgeous family. All the friends he could ever hope for. Every flying record in the book, smashed and resmashed, by no one other than himself. Universe-wide glory and renown. Everything. 

_ You know why _ , the voice in the back of his mind tells him, which he silences quickly. 

“We need to visit Lance,” Pidge tells him the next time they get together. 

Hunk frowns. “I just went—...well I guess that was three months ago now.”

“We  _ all _ saw him three months ago.” Pidge sighs and taps her fingers against the tabletop. They’re in her family’s kitchen, and somewhere deeper inside the house, Matt is laughing uproariously. Shiro’s happy that  _ someone _ is laughing. “You know it’s not good when we leave him alone.” 

They all lapse into silence because they know. The shared guilt is palpable. The grief is still live and raw in all of them, like it will be forever. But Lance always has carried the heaviest burden with the least assistance. 

“Man, remember when,” Hunk starts to say before trailing off with misty eyes, and Shiro instinctively tenses, because the statements that start like that are always the ones that strike him in the softest parts of his armor. 

“When what?” Pidge asks.

“We were on that planet with the giraffe aliens? And—”

“Kellador?” Pidge supplies. 

“Yeah, Kellador. And Lance spent the whole week complaining about how cold it was at night. And it turned out he’d thought the blankets they gave him were just curtains because they’d been hung to dry by the windows?” Hunk laughs. “I think I’ll always worry about him, no matter what had happened.”

Pidge chuckles too, but Shiro stays silent and muses on the idea of a boy who’s been to war and back but can’t keep himself warm at night. 

“We should check on him,” Shiro says resolutely. 

It must come out more grave that he intended, too much for the tone of the conversation, because they both do that thing where they eye him as if they think they know what’s better for him than he does for himself. 

“Shiro,” Pidge says quietly. “Is there anything you want to talk about?” 

“Not really,” Shiro replies, as casual as he can, though the bills from his psychologist would probably beg to differ.

Pidge rearranges her weight on her chair, and it creaks under her. “Anyway,” she says. “I don’t think it would hurt for us to drop by.” 

Her mouth twists into a thoughtful expression. 

“Maybe we should also call—” 

Hunk clears his throat loudly, just in time for Shiro to grip the edge of the table. 

He unclenches his fingers. Shakes them out. There’s a little dent in the table that he’ll fix up later, when no one’s watching. Pidge looks like she wants to say something to him, but probably for the sake of everyone, she just thins her lips. 

They don’t end up going to Lance’s for another two weeks. In that time Shiro demolishes more than four bottles of red wine, entirely on his own. He chalks it up to stereotypical divorcee behavior. He’s going through the motions of pain because he doesn’t know what else to do with himself right now. It’s never been like this for him. Forward motion was always the answer, but without somewhere to move  _ to, _ he has to give himself some other focus. Everyone has a pitying look for him, but he doesn’t have any sort of feeling left for himself. 

One night he wakes up at 3 AM alone and thrashing. He knocks his glass of water clear off the bedside table, and the sound of it shattering on the floor has him shaking for hours. 

His psychiatrist writes him a prescription for medical marijuana. He brings all of it to visit Lance, who laughs in his face when he sees it. 

“You don’t think I grow my own here?” he asks. “Come on, Shiro. Have a little faith.”

Of all of Lance’s laughs, of course, Shiro knows this one too intimately. It’s a kind of laugh they share these days. It’s not one Shiro thinks Lance would’ve made when they first met. 

They sit in Lance’s living room. His whole family lives here on the farm, but Lance has chosen to take over a small farmhouse apart from theirs. It’s more convenient for guests, he says, but they all know that Lance doesn’t invite people over often, if ever. The only reason they’re all here is thatbecause they’ve invited themselves. 

Hunk brought food, and they smoke before setting upon it like they’ve never tasted fried chicken and mashed potatoes in their lives. The chatter is lighthearted through the meal, but in the careful way that it is these days. Topics are discarded before they’re even brought up. Every statement is meticulously trimmed. It used to strike Shiro as weird, for people who have invaded each other’s minds. Now it’s just how they talk. 

“So when are you two getting married?” Lance asks Hunk and Pidge, half-joking. 

But then there’s a lot of shifting eyes. A guilty look that takes them all down. Shiro’s too high to follow well, but the atmosphere invades his shifting consciousness. 

“Actually,” Hunk laughs, two parts nervous and one part genuine, all parts dragging out his words too long. “We had Coran do a small ceremony a few months ago….”

“Hunk!” Pidge says, overloud. “We weren’t going to tell them!”

This stings at Shiro more than the original statement, because he knows it’s on his behalf. Well, his and Lance’s, if he thinks about it. But he’s the one with a distinct tan line still on the fourth finger of his left hand. 

He appreciates that people try to be respectful. He really does. 

“Congratulations!” he says, only moments too late, and Lance echoes him in a voice that was certainly not intended to sound as hollow as it does. 

They’re a good couple. They’ve always been lowkey about their interpersonal interactions. They work well together because they work well together. They have a lot in common. They can keep up with each other in ways that no one else can. 

Shiro contemplates these traits for the rest of the night, until the four of them are laying out on Lance’s deck with another joint between them, watching the faint stars that they can see past the light pollution. More than that, Shiro’s watching the come and go of spacecraft. From here they could be meteorites falling to Earth in a steady stream, a straight line from here to the heavens. 

“Do you ever think about heading back out there?” Hunk asks. 

“No,” they all lie in chorus. 

“Yeah.” Hunk laughs. “Me neither.”

There’s nothing out there for Shiro. 

There’s nothing down here for Shiro either. 

His friends, sure. Hunk and Pidge, settling down. Lance, self-isolated, avoidant, grows his own weed and god knows what else. The Garrison, all the pretty uniformed boys it contains, his years and years of service recognized every single time he walks into a room. 

Some nights he dreams about being at the helm of the Atlas. It feels like a wisp of something long forgotten in the deep cavity of his chest. Other nights he dreams of piloting the Black Lion. Of being  _ inside _ the Black Lion. He can almost hear a scream of his own name, a plea for help and assistance in a voice that will echo around the back of his mind until the end of his days. 

What they’ve lost, they’ve lost. There’s no jumping realities for Shiro. He knows how that one ends. 

Shiro has the deep conviction that Allura would be upset if she knew that Lance wasn’t moving on, but Shiro’s never even attempted to tell him that. 

He descends. 

This week’s guy is different. He’s Galra, for one. Shiro had never really anticipated that, but there’s something in his eyes that caught his attention in the Garrison-adjacent bar that he ends up at after work. Shiro is immediately obsessed, in a way that sits uncomfortably with him. He lets the Galra fuck him into the mattress three times and on the fourth, he starts sobbing uncontrollably, out of nowhere. The Galra leaves in a rush, and Shiro never hears from him again. 

Shiro’s never been a stay in bed all day kind of guy but a lot of things he’s done lately are strange. He wonders if he’s having some sort of midlife crisis at 31. It would explain a lot. People his age aren’t supposed to have gone through all the things that he has. No one is. 

He leaves his personal communicator turned off enough times that Pidge shows up at his door. 

“Can I talk to you?” she says.

_ No _ , Shiro thinks. But instead, he says, “Yes.”

As soon as the door shuts behind her, she goes to his closet. 

“Hello?” he says, but she doesn’t reply. He wonders if her infinite intelligence has led to her somehow being able to read minds, and if she heard him thinking that he doesn’t want to talk, and so she’s not. 

But if that was the case she probably wouldn’t be tearing things out of his closet either. Three pairs of jeans. Two jackets. Shirts. With her face scrunched up, she gathers an armful of his underwear and dumps it in a pile on his bed. 

“What are you doing?” he asks her. 

“We’re leaving,” is all the answer she gives him. 

Shiro starts for the pile, but it keeps growing in front of his eyes. 

“What? Where?” he demands. “I can’t. I have to—”

Pidge whirls on him, fight in her eyes. “ _ What _ do you have to do, Shiro?”

Shiro closes his mouth and stares at her. 

“Go ahead!” she says, her voice rising like it only does when she’s furious. “Tell me! What is  _ so _ important that you have to stay here, sleeping and drinking and fucking men who don’t give two shits about you past your title and your muscles?” 

Shiro starts. He’s not like that. He doesn’t do that. 

“I’m sick and tired of you and Lance moping around here all the time,” Pidge goes on, her voice dialing down despite the way she slams a pair of socks onto the pile of clothing. “It’s no fun when your friends all hate their lives. You were happier when we were in the middle of a war.”

“I have work,” Shiro tries. 

“The Garrison knows you’re leaving. Dad told them you’re going on sabbatical, and they thought that was a fantastic idea.” 

No. No. Shiro can’t leave. He can’t  _ go _ somewhere. 

“Pidge,” he tries, and his voice sounds like it’s been pulled across a grater. 

She looks him in the eye.

“At the very  _ quiznacking _ least, pretend you’re doing this for us,” she snaps. “Hunk and I, we’re—we’re going crazy here. And don’t even get me started on Lance. You know what it’s like.”

“Lance is coming?” Shiro asks. 

“We’re going to get him next.” Pidge huffs. “He’s coming whether he likes it or not. And so are you.” 

Shiro takes a deep breath. She knows him too well. Self-care is out of the realm of his abilities, but taking care of other people, at least, he can do. He knows Lance is in bad shape. Shiro doesn’t quite know where his self-respect has fled to, and Pidge’s words sting with truth. But all he can do now is support his team. 

Fine then. 

“Where are we going?” Shiro asks. 

There’s an answer he dreads, but he thinks Pidge knows better than to say it out loud. 

She does. “Nowhere. Everywhere. I don’t know. Not here.” 

“Right.” 

Twenty minutes later finds him in the civilian hangar. Being highly connected in the Garrison has its perks, because Pidge managed to push everyone else back on the departure list for them without even hacking into the system. 

“Paladin privileges,” she and Hunk joke as they nudge Shiro towards the pilot’s seat. 

“You want  _ me _ to fly?” he asks. 

Pidge and Hunk exchange a look. “What, you expect one of us to do it?” 

So Shiro sits down at the controls. He runs his hands over them. This craft is new, and he hasn’t flown anything like it yet, but the UI has stayed pretty standard over the years. Not to mention the strange buzz of innate connection his Altean prosthetic gives him with a lot of crystal-powered machinery.

“I asked about taking the Atlas,” Shiro hears Pidge telling Hunk in the back. “They said if they get it airborne again ten thousand years from now it’ll be too soon.”

Shiro frowns. Feels the crease form between his eyebrows. Clenches his hands into fists around the controls and boots up the engine. 

“Where are we going?” he asks, and it ends up sounding more like a growl than a question. 

“Dropping by Lance’s,” Pidge replies. “Then I have a basic idea. You been to New Olkarion lately?”

Lance gives them the exact same sort of answers that Shiro did. It makes Shiro want to say something to himself about hypocrisy, or to Lance about empathy. But the parallels are too far away for him to draw right now and his head still hurts. He’s thinking about the Galra who left him crying into his mattress and leaves the convincing to Hunk. They’ve been best friends for as long as Lance has known how to put his hands on the buttons of a simulator, so if anyone can get Lance on this spacecraft it’s him. 

It’s him, and he does. Hunk boards first, taking the seat in the back beside Pidge. Lance takes the hint and makes his way to the front of the pod, sighing as he sits down next to Shiro. 

“I don’t get why  _ we’re _ doing all the work when we’re the ones who are being dragged along on this trip,” is the first thing he says, in Shiro’s general direction, though it seems equally addressed to the universe at large. 

“You’ll navigate for me?” Shiro asks, the machine humming to life beneath his hands again. 

“I can.” Lance pauses. “I don’t know where we’re going.”

“New Olkarion!” Pidge shouts from the back. 

Lance and Shiro make sidelong eye contact and shrug. 

The first leg of the trip is uneventful. In fact, Shiro would compare it to life on Earth. He feels almost claustrophobic in this chair, in the same way he’s realizing now that he felt in his Garrison quarters. In the home he shared with Curtis. In the troposphere. But these thoughts don’t make sense. Being on the surface of Earth and being in the cockpit of a ship aren’t aligned occurrences. There’s little commonality between living a quaint quiet life of semi-retirement and seeing the stars stretch out beyond your windshield. 

It was probably a bad idea to come here. Shiro’s been in too many cramped pods with too many different kinds of passengers. He thought he’d left manual steering between the stars behind. 

“We should’ve used a wormhole,” Lance says after the first hour passes in near silence. Hunk has faint music playing on his tablet in the back, like this is some sort of 21st-century road trip taken for pleasure.

“Can we just enjoy the surroundings, man?” Hunk says. “Do you have any idea how much we would’ve loved to kick back and take a leisurely flight through space three years ago? You know how many Galra you would’ve killed to be where we are right now?” 

But Lance is restless. Maybe feeling claustrophobic too. Shiro can’t blame him. If there’s anyone who knows how much the open, empty universe can take away it’s Lance. 

Really, neither of them should’ve come. Shiro tries not to give form to the resentment that’s slowly heating to a simmer in the back of his mind, especially because he knows that Pidge means well. She has their best interests at heart, but she’s always been a bit misguided when it comes to her ideas about what that means for others. 

Maybe they can get to New Olkarion, wander around for a bit, and then turn around and head back. Lance can return to his family. Shiro can return to his work. Hunk and Pidge can get back to the part of their lives where they think they know what’s best for everyone around them because  _ they’ve  _ found happiness. 

Shiro knows what that’s like. He’s been there. Freshly-married and thinking that if only everyone could hop into a relationship, go off on a honeymoon, settle into a big house, they would find whatever joy they’re lacking, fill in the spaces of terror when they wake up to a dark house in the middle of the night with something less painful. Surely, if everybody just calmed down. Surely, if everybody just stayed where they were. They can all be happy if they try.

Shiro still spends his sleepless nights alone but it doesn’t matter. 

They don’t make it to New Olkarion. 

This was probably in the cards all along, thinks Shiro. More than that. It was probably planned. 

Pidge complains about wanting to stretch her legs. She slinks up behind Shiro, pulls up the map and tells Shiro to land on a nearby planet. She sounds too smug about it, too self-satisfied, and Shiro is so caught up in wondering why that he doesn’t notice where they are until they’ve torn through the atmosphere in their fiery hunk of machinery. 

The landscape spread out before Shiro’s eyes spears him through the chest when it registers. It’s too late to pull out of their dive. He lands roughly on the dusty, rocky surface and immediately begins making frantic preparations for departure. 

“Shiro, stop,” Pidge says. “Get out of the ship. Don’t you wanna reminisce?” 

No. No, Shiro does not want to reminisce but he also can’t make the desperate jump off the surface of this planet without letting on how there’s a free-bleeding wound somewhere under the thousands of band-aids he’s slapped on top of it. Even as Lance stands and looks around, asking where they are, why it’s important, Shiro can only stare out at the landscape with dull, tired eyes. 

This doesn’t have to be a big deal, he reminds himself. 

“Doesn’t look like there’s too much going on here,” Lance says, still prodding for answers that Shiro isn’t giving him. 

“There’s some fauna on this planet, but not much else,” Pidge replies. She doesn’t even make an attempt to pretend that she’s stretching. 

Shiro’s mind finally catches up to him. “Why would I want to reminisce about a place where I almost died?” 

He stands in the doorway of the craft, frowning at his surroundings. It’s gray rock and low gravity, as far as he can see. How did Pidge even find this place? How did she know it was on the way to New Olkarion? How long had she planned this? 

How many more stops like this does she have up her sleeve?

“I don’t know,” Pidge says. “You looked pretty cozy by the time I got here.”

He hadn’t felt cozy. But he didn’t feel as terrible as he knows he should have either. There had been a certain kind of peace he’d found in that moment. He’d long since been aware of his impending mortality. The fact that it wasn’t going to come about exactly as he’d planned had been no obstacle to the sense that he was doing as he was intended to. He’d thought, at the time, that all his affairs were in as much order as he could possibly ask them to be. He had never presumed he would live to see the end of the war anyway. And after the resonant thrum he’d felt rock his body when the Black Lion had found another pilot, he had felt safe in letting his wounds darken his vision.

He hadn’t felt cozy. But he’d felt hopeful. He’d felt proud. He’d felt fond. 

The memory makes him sick. 

“You doing okay, Shiro?” Lance asks, interrupting Pidge’s quiet explanation of how she’d found Shiro here after the Lions had gotten separated by the wormhole, years and years and years ago now. 

“I’m going to go sit down,” Shiro says. 

It’s space sickness. It’s a low-pressure atmosphere getting to him. It’s been too long since he’s been off-planet. It’s a million and a half things that make Shiro queasy. 

This isn’t the last memorable planet they land on. 

Lance gives up ‘navigating’ when he realizes that his systems are being controlled by Pidge’s typing somewhere behind him. They’ve probably been zooming in the opposite direction from New Olkarion since the moment they took off, and Lance gives a frustrated huff as he clears the console in front of him with a swipe of his hand. Shiro takes his instructions straight from Pidge. It feels like he was manhandled onto a roller coaster without being warned of its high speeds and steep drops beforehand, like the rickety track and the negative Gs have been conjured up in front of him from out of nowhere. 

They poke around Daibazaal for an hour or two. They fly by Altea and pretend they can’t hear Lance’s barely-contained sobs. They go to the planet where the Kral Zera’s flame used to burn bright and violet over the mountains and find it cold, desolate. They’re being tugged through their emotions on a leash by Pidge and Shiro can’t say he appreciates it. 

But he does learn to accept it. 

At some point he resigns himself to his fate, and instead of worrying over where Pidge’s voice is going to direct him to steer, or what he’s going to say to Lance, or if their next stop is going to knock all the breath out of him at once, he starts to look at the stars. 

Shiro has always loved the stars. 

But then he’s torn out of admiring them by the frantic beeps of an incoming call on someone’s communicator. It’s not his own. It’s coming from the back. There’s a shuffle, and then Pidge’s voice. 

“Took you long enough to get back to me,” she snipes. 

Shiro and Lance look at each other.  _ Who? _ Lance mouths, and there are a million names on Shiro’s tongue that he wants the answer to be. Matt. Her mother. Romelle. Coran. But the acidic pit in Shiro’s stomach gives him reason to believe it isn’t any of those. 

“I’m great,” she goes on. “How are you? No, never mind, don’t answer that.”

Shiro can hear her fingers flying over her keyboard as she talks. He somehow gets the idea that despite her casual tone and the non-urgent subject matter, she isn’t just saying hello. 

She laughs at something whoever is on the other end says. 

“Yeah, well,” she replies, with more than a trace of playful snideness. “You’re the expert on avoiding your feelings, after all.”

Something prompts her to laugh some more, but her fingers tapping away sound almost menacing beneath the sound of it. Lance has turned in his chair to watch Pidge talk, possibly hoping for some morsel of a clue as to who’s on the other end, but Shiro keeps his eyes on the stars. 

“No, I just wanted to make sure you’re still alive,” Pidge says. “I worry about you....… Nah, nothing much. The usual. You? …Well, I’ll leave you to it then. Don’t be a stranger though, alright? Miss you! Bye!” 

The sound of her tossing aside her phone is overlaid with a quiet, triumphant hiss of, “Got him!” that Shiro assumes wasn’t meant to be heard by anyone other than Hunk. 

There’s a sinkhole of dread in Shiro’s gut. That could’ve been anyone, Shiro reasons again. There’s no connection between this current moment and whoever was on the other end of the phone. There’s no reason for Shiro to feel as though he needs to be on the defensive. 

Pidge wouldn’t do anything to betray his trust. Pidge wouldn’t do anything to hurt him. 

“How are you doing on fuel?” she asks Shiro. 

He lets his eyes wander over the readouts and gauges, and of course, she would know to ask that now. They’re not concerningly low, but low enough that it should be a thought. If Shiro was on any other sort of trip, he would open a discussion about where to stop in the next few hundred light deca-phoebs, ask Lance to scope out a planet and direct them there, but he has the creeping feeling that Pidge already has a place in mind. 

“Alright,” he answers tersely, partially to call her bluff and partially to let her know that he isn’t in the mood for whatever game she’s concocting. 

She bulldozes. “There’s a planet coming up in the next system. V9-038X. It’s fourth from the red dwarf sun. It’s the orange one, you can’t miss it.”

Shiro doesn’t even know where they are anymore. They’ve skirted enough galaxies to be considered out in the boonies. Shiro’s never been to this particular sector, not in the days of war or liberation, and he doesn’t recognize the stars or the planets that slide smoothly by outside the display. The only thing that keeps his anxiety of open space from rearing its head is that he knows Pidge would never steer them somewhere she didn’t know they could get out of. 

The opposite side of that coin is that they’re at her mercy. If they don’t stop on V9-038X for fuel and rest, there’s no way of telling where else they could next find themselves in a reasonable place for that. Pidge could easily hold them hostage on this shuttle until they run out of oxygen or agree to her terms. 

It’s easier to let himself be manipulated into taking the craft down to the landing bay that Pidge directs him to on the planet that she had very accurately described as orange. It’s not large, and the gravity is low, the atmosphere incompatible with their respiratory systems. The traffic on and off the planet seems to be mostly made of junk ships and pirate cruisers, unregulated and obvious even from a distance. With a concerned glance back at Pidge, Shiro has to wonder for the nth time where Pidge has forced them to come. 

There’s the distinct air of the kind of backwater seediness you only find on far-flung planets like these when Shiro disembarks in an unattended parking hangar. He’s sure to lock the ship up tight, but he also flings a nearby adolescent Galra leaning against a building a few GAC to “keep an eye on things”, imagining, at the very least, that it may stop that particular individual from jacking their ship. 

Pidge has her phone shoved nearly to her nose as she follows whatever directions it’s spitting out. It almost reminds Shiro of Hunk’s tinkering, following Fraunhofer lines out into the dusty yellow desert, but this time there’s almost certainly not a lion at the end of Pidge’s wandering footsteps. The Lions haven’t been seen in years, and they’re definitely not out here. 

Shiro prays that whatever  _ is _ at the end of Pidge’s single-minded search is just as rewarding and not at all painful, but his faith in that belief is shaky at best. 

Possibly sensing his building distress, Hunk pats Shiro firmly on the back as they walk. 

“You good?” he asks. 

Shiro shrugs. “Have I ever been good?” He tries to make it sound lighthearted but it’s more dirgelike than anticipated.

Hunk slides him a sidelong glance as he dodges a bustling merchant pushing a cart full of balgusfruit along the narrow corridor of the underground thoroughfare they’ve entered. There’s artificial gravity here and it’s set to a higher degree than Earth’s. Shiro already feels exhausted. 

“I know Pidge can be kind of annoyingly single-minded about stuff like this,” Hunk says, “but she’s doing this for you. You know we all care, right?”

“Yeah.” Shiro frowns. “Yeah, of course I do.”

But he also knows that there’s something going on here that everyone seems to be in on but him, and that knowledge adds twenty pounds to his shoulders. He has a lot of qualms with that, mainly that he’s an adult who can take care of himself and he doesn’t need other people forcing what they think is in his best interest on him. But Shiro knows that he’s too understanding to be truly angry about it. He knows that they’re trying their best, and they’re doing it for  _ him _ . 

Though there’s always the possibility that something may come of this that Shiro can’t forgive.

Their winding path among beady-eyed merchants and rag-draped panhandlers eventually leads them down through the corridors of a dirty tunnel system to a narrow alleyway. Water drips from the ceiling to form a murky puddle at the end, and there’s only one door, if you could call it that, under the dingy bare lightbulb that hardly lights the space. The doorway is barred by a heavy curtain, and the sign beside it gives notice that on the other side is a bar. 

Lance stops Shiro with a hand on his chest just before they duck through the door after Hunk and Pidge. The look he’s giving him is shrewd, almost judging, and he’s frowning when he says, “You’re an adult. Act like one.”

Yeah. Yeah, they’re  _ definitely _ all in on something, and Shiro has the most unshakable, horrifying feeling that he knows what it is. As he follows the others inside, he physically shoves down his nausea with a closed mouth and a swallow. 

The saving grace, perhaps, is that  _ he _ is just as shocked to see them as Shiro is to see him. 

In post-war recountals Shiro has heard laughing stories told about the night he crashed burning against the Earth’s hard desert. How Lance and Pidge and Hunk had watched him from high above, on the Garrison rooftop. How they’d seen the flare of the distracting explosives, and how, staring through Pidge’s binoculars, Lance had shouted something ridiculous and rude like, “I would recognize that mullet anywhere!”

Shiro can relate to that right now. There’s no mullet in sight, so it’s more of a spiritual sister of that infamous moment. Rather than just a hairstyle, there’s a million and one things he zeroes in on in the dim light of the hazy bar. There’s the strong line of a proud spine. There’s the oil slick spill of dark hair, long and silken and tied over a shoulder. There’s the fair stretch of unblemished neck, the hard cut of a defiant jaw. The general demeanor of someone who’s grown from their hardships, forged into steel. And all of it is like a neon sign, proclaiming the identity of the man who owns it. 

Shiro’s lungs ice over in his chest. He can’t expand or contract them, and the oxygen feels like it’s been punched out of him. The frost spreads to his heart, making his blood ache in his veins. 

He watches, like in slow motion, like in zero gravity, as Pidge makes her way straight for the bar stool beside the most beautiful patron and clambers up onto it.

The man looks at her, and Shiro watches the moment he registers the company manifest as a full-body jolt. It’s not often that someone can pull one over on him, and something about it makes Shiro feel marginally better about this entire shitty situation. 

“Hi,” Pidge says. 

“How did you—” Keith replies.  

Then he turns, slowly. He catches sight of Hunk hovering nervously beyond Pidge’s shoulder, wringing his hands. Then there’s Lance, an eyebrow raised, taking in Keith’s appearance. And finally, Keith’s eyes alight on Shiro. 

They stare at each other, unblinking, uncomprehending, for a long moment, and Shiro rounds the corner on the realization that there isn’t going to be any “being an adult” about this, despite Lance’s instructions. This isn’t the table at Allura Day. This isn’t within the jurisdiction of their unspoken ceasefire. They’re dead in the middle of their own personal Cold War here, and it shows clear in the way Keith straightens his shoulders, trims his mouth into a firm, thin line, and turns back towards Pidge. 

Two can play at that game. 

“Tracked your phone,” Pidge replies casually, brandishing her own. She hops off the stool and grabs Keith by the wrist. “Come on. Let’s catch up.” 

Together the party makes its way to a sheltered booth in the back of the bar, but not before Keith snags his drink off the counter and pulls it along with him. They all slide in, and Shiro makes sure he’s sitting as far away from Keith as he can. 

Hunk notices and raises his eyebrows, and in the name of attempting civility, Shiro ignores him.

Shiro had never quite understood it himself, except in some quiet, petty way in a part of his mind he tried his hardest to ignore, but people had always used to talk to him about “winning” the breakup. Especially in the aftermath of Adam, sometimes Matt would creep up behind him on the shuttle and give him a firm  _ thump _ on the back and say, “How do you think Adam feels on Earth right now while you’re all the way out here?” 

It’s a flimsy consolation prize, Shiro has always thought. You lose a human being. You lose a part of yourself that loved that human being. No one “wins” a breakup. Even if you come out happier, even if you emerge with your heart fully intact, even if everything was unarguably mutual, there’s still a loss. Something had to break, or there wouldn’t have been a relationship in the first place. It’s not about winning or losing. It’s about making healthy decisions.

It’s not like Shiro and Keith had ever dated, and so there was no breakup to ever win. It’s not like Shiro and Keith had ever been anything beyond a few passionate kisses and a love that would draw them over and over again to the brink of death. 

But somehow, right now, Shiro gets an irrational, spiteful tickle from the way Keith has bags under his eyes. From the way he refuses to look at Shiro for more than a second at a time, like he’s afraid not to acknowledge he exists but also scared to give him too much attention. From the way he’s sitting with his shoulders hunched over in the corner of a filthy dive, completely by himself. 

If Shiro’s suffering, at least he’s not going about it alone. At least there’s someone else here who’s been beaten down as much as he has. 

(But there’s a struggle to not notice how the individual lines of his face still gather to create something far superior to anything else Shiro has laid eyes on.  _ God _ , is he beautiful. Shiro rubs at his temples.)

No one stops to exchange pleasantries. That might be their way on Allura Day, small talk that makes all their scalps itch, a sense of weird distance that pervades their conversations. But here in this dark bar surrounded by alien creatures who aren’t bothering to hide their stares behind their drinks, it doesn’t seem like the time or place for  _ how are you _ s. 

They already know how each other are doing, after all. It doesn’t take Pidge’s intellect to figure out that the end of the war still has them reeling.

So instead, Lance goes for the throat.

“Keith, what are you even doing out here?” he asks. “I thought you were working with the Blade.”

Keith’s eyes are already averted, but he seems to withdraw even further into himself, his shoulders curling and his overlong bangs swinging down in front of his face. He mumbles something into his drink, hoarse and clipped. 

Pidge leans in. Hunk’s expression twists into a frown, and Lance’s laser-eyed vision is locked on his face, serious and unbudging. 

“ _ What _ ?” Lance says. 

“I’m…,” and then an inaudible string of choppy, unconfident syllables. 

This time even Shiro abandons his pretense of casual indifference to draw in closer to the circle of heads with their ears angled towards Keith. Why  _ is _ Keith out here on a planet even more remote than Earth? Sitting in a seedy bar, unkempt hair puffing out around his face, circles under his eyes and a sunless pallor in his cheeks? Unwilling to talk to them openly about how he came to be here?

“Keith, speak up,” Pidge snaps. 

His eyes go steely. His teeth grit behind the snarl of his mouth. His hands tighten into twin fists on the tabletop, and his brow buckles under the strain of his emotion. 

“I’m looking,” he says, voice low, deliberate, and through the clench of his teeth, “for Allura.”

Somehow, the silence and stillness at the table seems to echo, or bleed into itself like a bell tone. 

“Keith,” Lance says, and his voice cracks across the syllable. “Allura’s dead.” 

Keith’s forehead is deeply furrowed, his frown chiseled into his face. 

“I know. I mean—we thought she was.”

Pidge is leaning all the way forward in her seat, her mouth hanging open, her eyebrows drawn low. Hunk has something like all the sadness of the universe in his eyes. Lance’s expression is almost severe in how carefully unfeeling it is. His frown sits uncomfortably on his lips. 

“What do you mean?” Hunk asks. 

Keith presses the palm of a hand to his face and rubs at his forehead like that will erase the way he’s twisted and scrunched all his features. 

“Do you remember,” he says hoarsely, “how I found the Blue Lion?” 

Shiro’s mind takes him back through time and space to waking up with sand in his mouth and blood under his fingernails but  _ on Earth _ and  _ alive _ and  _ seeing the rising sun with his own two eyes _ . He remembers standing in front of a boy who had spent too long living in a dilapidated shack and his painstakingly-made corkboard, completely with little post-it notes that read, in the scrawl of a hand that had been awake for too many hours,  _ It’s killing me when you’re away. _

“The weird energy,” Lance says. 

“Yeah,” Keith replies, and his voice is strained, stretched thin like putty. “The Lions’ quintessence, I guess. I could feel it. I knew where it was.” 

Hunk laughs, something small and nervous and jittery. “But, I mean, the Lions left, man. They’re gone.” He looks around the table, tapping his fingers against each other. “I can’t be the only one who’s tried to call mine back, right? They’re gone for good.” 

“Mhmm,” Pidge agrees, but she’s still looking at Keith like she expects him to get to his point at any second. 

“I think they’re still out there,” Keith says, more towards the tabletop than any one of them. “I can feel them.” 

Eyebrows raise all around, but Lance is staring Keith down with the concentration of a cat on its prey.

“And...I feel Allura too. Her life force is still connected to the Lions. I think….” He takes a deep, shuddering breath. “I think she’s out there somewhere.”

It feels like the entire universe had quieted, muted, focused down to the single point of their table in the back of a loud bar. 

Lance’s chair legs squeal against the tile floor as he pushes back from the table and stands. He mumbles some excuse before he’s tripping over himself to get towards the door. They all watch him go in heartbreaking silence, and then Keith sighs and buries his face in his hands. 

Shiro’s chest aches. Fuck, does it ache, worse than the phantom pain of his arm when it was first removed. 

_ Your team is hurting _ , some unhelpful voice in the back of his head reminds him. He tries to combat it with  _ they’re not my team anymore _ but joining to create a single war machine over and over and over does nothing but cement your bonds with some people, forever. Shiro knows he’ll never escape. 

“I didn’t want to tell you guys,” Keith says into the softness of the heel of his hand. “Not til I knew for sure.” 

“No, Keith,” Pidge says. “This is really good news.”

But her voice is flat. 

It’s not that it isn’t good news. Because it is, if it’s true. But that’s the problem. It’s too good. There’s no way. They all witnessed Allura’s departure. They all said their goodbyes. She had left, had given them their universe and every other universe and all of reality. The rawness of it still stings like it had happened yesterday, and there’s a foolhardiness in thinking that a group of pain-riddled, lost 20-somethings could really know the way to recover all the things that have been ripped from their lives like sloppy amputations left to bleed. 

“Don’t get your hopes up,” Keith says, voice hoarse, in the bitter way of someone who has done just that too many times. 

They won’t. Shiro knows that they won’t. They’re too old and too tired to deal in flimsy counterfeits like hope. 

Hunk is still looking towards the door that Lance disappeared through, his mouth stretched into a deep frown, his eyes endlessly downtrodden.

“I’m not the one who told you guys this,” he says, “but he’s spent months locked in his house just staring at himself in mirrors, waiting for his marks to turn out to be magic or  _ something _ . I’ve caught him so many times.” 

Shiro’s heart, already crushed to bits, shatters again. 

It doesn’t feel fair. 

It doesn’t feel fair, and it isn’t. Not when the heart that held firm at the center of their lives was destroyed, like the cracking of a Balmeran crystal at the center of a battleship. Not when the person who could always draw a smile from any of them can’t muster a smile himself. Not when one of them is staring mournfully after his best friend, asking if anyone wants to go back to space. Not when one had to pry all of them out of their misery only to get them here. Not when Shiro himself is living his days in a dim haze, feeling lower than the floor of this bar. 

Not when the brightest light in Shiro’s entire life is sitting across from him, facing the table, looking like the universe has beaten even his diamond-hard spine into submission again and again and again. 

_ Your team is hurting _ , the voice in Shiro’s head repeats, and how could he let it get this far? These are the people who have had his back no matter what. How come he hasn’t had theirs? How many times have each of them saved him? 

“Keith,” says Shiro, and there’s something hard in his own voice that surprises even him, that makes the others at the table perk up in a way that feels satisfying to watch. “What do you need to find her?” 

Keith raises his head, slowly, and for the first time, truly looks at Shiro. 

“I need help,” he says simply.


	2. Chapter 2

Something about this rings too familiar. 

The pictures and pins. The strings, the diagrams, the photographs. Scribblings, charts. Sequences of numbers. Sticky notes that Keith tears down and crumples in his palm when Shiro gets too close.

Keith has always been better with the physical than the abstract and it’s not surprising to see the workspace that takes up the half of his cramped quarters not occupied by a very excited, very large Kosmo. It’s a temporary place to live, he tells them of the dim apartment, but Shiro wonders from the books stacked in the corners how long he’s actually been here already. Pidge scoffs at the sight of the mess spread like climbing vines over an entire wall and asks if a former leader of Voltron doesn’t have the money to invest in a computer and a simple spreadsheet program, but they all know that’s not the issue. Keith likes the feeling of having something to hold in his hands. 

That’s the reason for the board. The printed pictures of deep space, fuzzy with distance, and the scrawled red circles on star maps of sectors Shiro has never seen. 

“I don’t think tracking a Fraunhofer line is going to cut it this time,” Keith says, and welcomes them to examine his findings with a gesture of his hand. 

Again, Pidge laments his lack of a computer, of neat databases and spreadsheets and findings filed neatly into folders. Hunk hums his agreement, but he’s already zeroed in on the lines and lines of numbers, asking questions about what it is, where Keith got it, what sort of data it’s representative of and why he thinks it’s relevant. Keith rattles off responses that Shiro barely understands, but Hunk and Pidge’s nods must mean something. 

Shiro wants to ask things too. He wants to ask a lot of things, if he’s being perfectly honest with himself, which he’s not. But he allows himself to think the relevant questions that come to mind before banishing them to the inside of his closed mouth. He lets Lance, who they eventually found kicking around in the dirt outside the bar, ask the layman’s questions instead. 

“What started all this?” he asks. He seems equal parts awed and begrudging. Of all the people who don’t want to get their hopes up, he’s first on the list and happy with his place there. 

“I don’t know,” Keith answers honestly, reaching up to brush his fingertips against some of the papers, knocking a layer of dust free. He seems more at ease here in his own quarters than he had at the bar, but Shiro can tell that from the way his back is carefully angled he’s still trying to erase the existence of Shiro from his mind. “One morning I woke up and...I felt the pull.”

Lance nods like this makes sense. Like any of this has ever made sense. 

“You’ve always been the most connected to the Lions,” says Lance in a quiet, respectful voice he would’ve used infrequently, if ever, before. “Do you really think it’s them?” 

His tone seems to hold the hope that Keith will say no. Shiro is in accord with this. So is everyone, probably. There’s a certain safety to not getting your hopes up, and he can feel them all clinging to it with a startling tenacity. 

“Yes,” says Keith instead. “I know it’s them. It’s just a matter of locating them.” 

“But  _ how _ do you know?” says Hunk, turning from the board. “I’m not saying you don’t, dude, but... _ how _ ?”

“I know my Lions, okay?” Keith replies. “You would know too if you felt them.”

“Then why  _ don’t _ we?” 

They all want to believe. Shiro knows they do, and he wants to believe too. But there’s too much at stake here. This is going to hurt all of them in the end. He can see the dangers of this a light year away. And yet.

“This is gonna sound weird,” Keith says, as though any of this up until this point hasn’t, “but I think the Lions’ energy may have imprinted on me while my mom was pregnant.” 

Pidge shrugs. “I’ve heard more far-fetched theories. Your mom was protecting the Blue Lion on Earth when she had you, right?” 

“Yeah,” replies Keith. “Yeah, exactly.” 

“There’s probably more to it than that, but it’s irrelevant to the current situation anyway.” Pidge smooths out a simple map of this solar system under her palms and leans in to read what Keith has scribbled in under each of the planets. “My question is what makes you think that Allura’s with them?”

Hunk flinches in the subtle way they all do when the name is spoken aloud around Lance or Coran. It’s still a taboo, except under specific circumstances.

Eyes closed, Keith rubs at his forehead. He looks too young to be carrying the weight he bears, and yet too old for his years. 

“I don’t know,” he says, exhaling heavily. “I can  _ feel _ her. It’s her— her energy.”

A blanket of quiet settles over them, and Shiro chances a look at Lance. He’s gazing at Keith with a carefully blank expression, but Shiro can see the gloss over his eyes. 

“So,” Shiro says, and his voice sounds overloud. It’s the first time he’s spoken since they left the bar. “We find the Lions. We find Allura.”

“We’re going to trust this?” Lance asks. It sounds like it was supposed to come out demanding, angry, but instead he sounds helpless and small. For the sake of his dignity, Shiro pretends not to see the quiver in his brow. 

Instead, before the meaning of his words can truly coalesce in his brain, Shiro replies, “When has Keith ever been wrong before?” 

The look that Pidge shoots him is almost judgmental, and Shiro uses his indignation at it to distract him from the way Keith’s shoulder tense out of the corner of his eye. It seems that even so much as acknowledgment is a raw nerve right now, and Shiro hides his creeping regret behind a wall of annoyance. He tells himself it’s Keith who’s acting immature and returns to the matter at hand. This is about Allura, not about Shiro’s failed attempts at finding happiness. 

“Shiro’s right,” Pidge agrees, looking away. “Keith’s good at this kind of thing. And what’s the harm if he’s wrong?” 

The harm is in the hope, and they all know it. It still seems too optimistic, and Shiro knows they’re going to all crash like a meteorite to rock when this doesn’t work out. Lance in particular needs to be watched after, and they all know it. 

_ But when has Keith  _ ever _ let you down? _ the voice in the back of Shiro’s head insists again. 

“So uhh,” Hunk says. “What do we do then? Just follow Keith’s magical feelings until we find the Lions, or…?” 

“Well, unlike last time, now we’ve got the resources of the whole universe at our disposal.” Pidge’s tone makes it sound like she’s already invested. “I think we need to sit down and gather all the data we can.” 

So they do just that, cross-legged on the floor around Keith’s small coffee table. Shiro does his best to sit opposite Keith so that there’s no danger of them making physical contact in the narrow space, but all that means is that they have the potential of making repeated eye contact. And they do, over and over, through Keith’s thorough explanations. At first it’s distracting, and Keith stumbles over his words when he and Shiro lock eyes. Belatedly, Shiro becomes aware that he hasn’t been listening to anything Keith has said yet, his focus on the sprig of hair that’s escaped from Keith’s hair tie around his ears, the dark glow of his purple eyes. 

He tries to tune in but the fact of the matter is he hasn’t set eyes on Keith in a long time. It’s like being planetside after a long flight. Like seeing a flower, or a sunrise, or the ocean. You always know what those things look like. You can picture them in your head. But seeing them again takes your breath away because your imagination can never give you all the imperfect beauty of the real thing. Shiro can ignore the palpable growth in his chest that makes it hard to breathe when he thinks about Keith from a distance, but he can’t ignore the beauty of him when seated just feet away. 

It’s no surprise to him that the years and his own efforts haven’t tarnished this feeling. 

When Shiro’s mind begins to be capable of sorting Keith’s voice into words, he learns a few things. He finds out that Keith’s feelings pulled him here, to this system, to this planet specifically. That he thinks the hidden location of the Lions can’t be far off. That he’s been scouring deep space photographs of the adjacent uncharted areas, void of planets, suns,  _ anything _ , and has found some anomalies. That he’s triangulated the positions of the Lions’ initial hiding places, where the Paladins found them after their 10,000-year hibernation, and come up with some interesting results. 

Pidge and Hunk take over from there, unloading their tablets from their bags onto the table. No one else can keep up with their chatter, so they don’t even try. That leaves a silent Lance, who has been staring into middle distance for the vast majority of the conversation, Shiro, and Keith. 

Shiro considers saying something. Anything. But he isn’t sure where to start. To say that he and Keith had last parted on a sour note is a severe understatement, and when he thinks about it he’s filled with a rush of embarrassment and self-loathing. But he doesn’t blame himself for everything that led up to that point, and part of his reticence to bridge the chasm that’s cracked open between them is a petty pointed finger at Keith for ruining the best friendship in his life. 

The moment lapses into the next, and instead of speaking they all pretend to be paying attention to what Hunk and Pidge say. And at the end of it all, Pidge has coordinates and a flight path. 

“It’s not precise,” she warns. “We don’t really know what’s out there. But I think it’s worth heading out and seeing if we find anything.”

It might be worth it. It might not be. But wordlessly they all agree that this is just the next thing to do. On the off chance that Allura  _ is _ out there, if they don’t exhaust all their resources, Shiro knows every single one of them will always wonder. 

They spend the night planetside. Keith offers Pidge his extra futon, as she’s the only one small enough to sleep on it comfortably, and the others rent a small, dingy room at a nearby hostel. The morning finds them congregating back at the ship, which is thankfully still parked and whole exactly where they left it. 

“You guys got room for me?” Keith asks. “I’ve got a pod here if not, but—”

“You should pilot,” Pidge says over her shoulder as she boards the craft.

It’s obvious. Keith gives an acquiescent shrug and pushes his way onto the ship and towards the cockpit, Kosmo’s large bulk following him up the gangplank. Shiro, in turn, starts towards the back, but he’s stopped by Lance’s hand on his shoulder. 

“Come on man,  _ really _ ?” Lance says, loud enough for all to hear. “You’re co-pilot. Get up there.”

As if in a nightmare, Shiro looks to find Hunk and Pidge behind him, blinking silently, owlishly, lending their iron support to Lance’s words.

Shiro steels himself (“ _ You’re an adult. Act like one.”) _ and slips into the cockpit, taking the seat beside Keith. There’s absolutely no reaction as he does; instead, Keith simply continues with the start-up sequences as though no one else is there. It’s about what Shiro expects, and about what he deserves, he’ll admit, but if they’re going to be stuck in this tin can together for the foreseeable future there’s nothing wrong with making the attempt to at least inhibit the free bleeding of the wounds between them. 

“Hey,” Shiro says quietly, but casually. 

“Hey,” Keith replies, not removing his eyes from his task. The sound of it is a little clipped, a little irritated, but that’s just how Keith talks sometimes, so Shiro doesn’t take it as a sign that there’s anything wrong. 

Even though he knows there is. 

“This is going to be a long trip,” Keith calls to the back as the craft rumbles to life. “We got provisions?” 

Pidge laughs. “As if Hunk would ever go anywhere without provisions.”

“Just makin’ sure,” Keith says to himself under his breath, and then suddenly there’s air beneath them. 

Before long, open space unravels in front of them, star-speckled and cold, dark and unforgiving, as they leave the solar system behind. In the back, Shiro can hear a murmur of conversation between Pidge and Lance. He tries to bottle away the resentment that rises at them for putting him in this situation. Sitting beside Keith, watching Keith track their route without need or want of assistance, the air thick and heavy with their silence. It’s not as though they don’t  _ know _ . He gets the sense that this is some well-intentioned meddling, but it’s futile. There’s nothing left here but the cloud vapors of a long-departed flight. 

He does his best to keep his eyes off his co-pilot, but under his flight suit, the hair on his arm stands on end at the discomfort of their proximity. They barely make it a handful of vargas before Shiro can’t handle it anymore, and he gets up and wanders into the back under the pretense of stretching his legs. 

Pidge, Hunk, and Lance are playing some sort of game with their heads bent over their communicators, laughing and trash talking. For a moment Shiro hovers in the passageway, and the sight catches him in the gut. It’s weird. It’s weird to see his Paladins together. It’s weird to be on a ship steered through the cosmos by Keith. It’s weird to think that there’s the slightest chance that they could be on their way to their Lions. 

To Allura.

For a second he finds it hard to move around the ache. 

Why isn’t this his?

“Hey Shiro,” Lance says, glancing up and taking notice of him. He must realize Shiro needs some sort of reprieve because he pats the seat beside him and puts his communicator down. “Wanna sit?”

Must be taking a break from the meaningless romcom shenanigans then. Shiro does want to sit, somewhere that’s as far from Keith as he can possibly get inside this vehicle, because he and Keith are getting on like oil and water. So he settles himself on the other side of Lance and lets his shoulders slump back against the wall behind him. His right one hits with a dull  _ clunk _ . Hunk gives them both a look and rises out of his seat, making his way to the front to join Keith in the cockpit. 

There’s quiet again, and Shiro feels a little bit guilty for breaking up their game, but Pidge seems to be playing on her own just fine and Lance is always quiet these days. He seems to bask in it often, not as a pleasurable thing but as a necessity. It’s possible that words can’t hold the enormity of what he has inside of him, and that’s okay. Shiro feels that way too. 

From the front comes the cadence of easy conversation. The low ramble of Hunk’s casual tone, punctuated by Keith’s remarks, upturned in what’s probably sarcasm. Shiro can’t hear what they’re talking about from here, but Keith and Hunk have always had a good, frank relationship. 

There’s a creeping irritation somewhere in the back of Shiro’s mind that he has to shut down. Keith is not his best friend anymore, and hasn’t been for a long time. It doesn’t mean anything that Keith will have casual conversations with everyone but him. In fact, it’s natural. 

“Hey,” says Lance, tapping the side of Shiro’s foot with his own and cutting through his dark cloud of introspection. “I didn’t invite you to sit here so you could just gaze longing back at the cockpit.” 

Shiro whips his gaze away from the front of the craft. He tries to play it off but he knows his hands are red. 

“Was I gazing longingly?” he says, his laugh self-deprecating. 

“It’s okay, man,” Lance says. “We all have that one who got away. Mine was named Angelica.”

Shiro tries not to bristle. He knows that Lance is only trying to lift his spirits. It’s not working particularly well, which would have come as a surprise at one point in his life but is now par for the course. He indulges Lance in a forced, sideways smile. 

They go quiet again. Shiro listens for the rasping lilt of a sound he already has memorized.

Lance shifts beside him, leaning forward to interrupt his line of sight. 

“So, uh, am I allowed to ask?” Lance says. “What even happened there? I tried to ask him ages ago and he totally brushed me off.”

Shiro only contemplates answering because Lance’s voice is respectfully low, because there’s something raw and aching in his tone that tells Shiro not only does he know what it’s like to lose an important relationship, but he doesn’t like to know that his friends have experienced the same pain. It’s a testament to how much Lance has grown, and how much he has hurt, and Shiro can, at the very least, take pity on him by telling him. 

It’s a good question, anyway. How did Keith go from following Shiro to the ends of the universe, throwing himself to his death in order to save him, to pretending he doesn’t exist? Even though Shiro can trace the chronological line of it, the events and the reasons, it still baffles him sometimes in the middle of the nights he spends memorizing his ceiling. 

There’s no reason not to talk through it. Not anymore, when none of it really matters in the grand scheme of things.

“It started on the way back to Earth,” Shiro says, slowly. He’s never actually told anyone about this, and he’s never really considered that he might, but he’s thought through what words he might use in his head if he ever got the chance. He’s had to be his own therapist, sometimes. “I think I was starting to realize what we meant to each other and I was both happy...and afraid.” 

While Shiro gathers his thoughts, Lance looks at him patiently, waiting for him to go on. 

“I was confused, too,” is what Shiro eventually offers. “I...the feelings I had for Keith shocked me with how intense they were. But he had called me his brother, and I couldn’t miss the way Acxa looked at him, and he seemed to indulge her so I thought that I might as well give him space.”

“Which is why you moved to the Green Lion,” Lance says. 

“Yes, partially.”

“We all thought that was weird.”

“It was weird, to be honest.” 

“I don’t think he took that very well,” Lance says, gentle but scolding.

Shiro closes his eyes and remembers their turbulent days, floating through open space. He still gets frustrated sometimes when he thinks of it. His body had not been his own then. He’d been down an arm, still getting used to basic functions like physical touch, like arousal, like the low burning of joy in his gut whenever Keith so much as walked into the room. He’d been adrift in so many ways, not connected to a Lion, excluded from the experiences the Paladins had together. He had felt like he was making his way through the days backwards, or upside down, and everything that had once been expected was now new again. And given everyone else’s preoccupation with everything that was going on, a lot of it had been dealt with alone.

“I know,” Shiro replies. “He’s always been terrified of people leaving him. That’s true to this day. But sometimes instead of holding them tighter, he pushes them away.”

Lance raises his eyebrows. “He pushed you away?” 

“Not at first,” Shiro says. “When we first got back to Earth, we were so busy all the time. And I could tell that we were on the edge of something. We kissed a few times. He slept in my bed more than once. But we never got the chance to talk about it because, well, we were in a war.

“I still don’t know what happened. Maybe it all made Keith assume it was a casual thing to me, or that I wasn’t going to prioritize him. Maybe he really did never see me like that. But I just wanted to focus on what was at hand so I could give him the attention he deserved later but I think I just ended up scaring him.”

Shiro has his theories. He likes to give Keith the benefit of the doubt. He knows that Keith loved him, but even though he knows there’s an irrationality to it he’ll always wonder  _ how much _ . Shiro still has the words he remembers Keith saying to him not once but twice emblazoned into his brain.  _ You’re like a brother to me _ , and,  _ You’re my brother. I love you. _ Keith was so pure— _ is _ so pure—and his adoration and devotion towards Shiro had always taken whatever shape Keith thought would suit Shiro best. Both then and now, Shiro can’t shake the self-doubt that perhaps Keith had only allowed things to grow in their brief romantic direction because, being so attuned to every one of Shiro’s desires, he had sensed that that was what Shiro wanted. The thought that Keith had never loved Shiro romantically at all is a painful one, but a realistic one. Maybe he had tried it and realized it was outside even the limitless bounds of his unrelenting love. 

After a certain point, it was Keith who started putting that distance there, after all. Shiro remembers the sharp hurt of when the tables turned. The halting hand on Shiro’s chest when he leaned in for a kiss on the Atlas. The quiet, “Maybe tomorrow,” when Shiro asked if he would stay the night. 

The look Lance gives him is flat and unimpressed. “And it never occurred to you to talk to him about this?”

Shiro deserves that one, and he knows it. He sighs, and smiles wistfully. 

“Lance,” he says with a dry chuckle, “I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but I’m terrible at relationships.”

“You really are, dude. Oh for three.” Lance screws his face up into a grimace. “Is that why you guys were so weird through the thing with Honerva?” 

Shiro shrugs. “It just kept getting worse. We were both so busy, and we had a war to win. And then I started spending time with Curtis, and Keith noticed. And he ran away.”

Back then he hadn’t even thought of Curtis in any sense other than his subordinate, but he knows from later conversations with his ex-husband that he had been pursuing Shiro since before Shiro so much as knew his name. Keith’s ever-watching eyes had, of course, of course picked up on the subtle dynamics of that before Shiro had even gotten the chance. A part of Shiro feels guilty, knowing that if he had been more aware of the interpersonal and less focused on the fighting, maybe he could have settled Keith’s concerns. Another part of him wants to be angry that Keith had never expressed  _ any _ of this to him before putting as much distance between them as possible. 

“After the war ended I think we were all just left reeling,” Shiro says, turning his face down towards his lap. “I was desperate for something to prove that it’d all been worth it. Getting married seemed like the best option.”

“You guys did get hitched real quick,” Lance replies. “That couldn’t have felt nice for Keith.” 

In Shiro’s defense, he’s never dealt in long-terms. Having just arrived back on Earth after a years-long war and faced with the knowledge that upwards of 60 years stretched out before him, Shiro had panicked. He’d never known numbers like that before. Everything in his life until then needed to be immediate. His missions, immediate. The war, immediate. The idea of waiting for the right person, the right time, the right thing to do was so foreign to him he hadn’t even considered it an option. 

So the engagement had been like that. Shiro had only known a life that necessitated the guidelines of  _ now or never _ . Of course, it had been like that with Adam back in the day too. Shiro had loved Adam, unwaveringly, deeply, but some part of the back of his mind had always known that the disconnect in values was far too strong for it to last. 

But that wasn’t the issue. It was never meant to  _ last _ . Not when Shiro wasn’t meant to last either. He could say the same about Curtis.

“It probably didn’t,” he allows anyway. “It probably felt even worse when….” Shiro takes a deep breath, and decides he’s already bared so much of himself, there’s no harm in revealing his shame. “There was an incident the day before the wedding. I might’ve let it slip to Keith that I still felt something for him. The next day was the last time I saw him, until now.”

Lance winces. “Yikes, man. I wouldn’t want to see you again either.” He cocks his head and looks at Shiro shrewdly. “So, is there a reason you haven’t apologized? I’m kinda surprised.”

Shiro looks away. The answer is yes, there are a million reasons he hasn’t apologized. Some of them are good ones, and some of them are bad. Some of them are logical and some are immoral and truth be told it’s not the first time he’s asked himself that question. It’s not even the first time today. 

“I don’t think he wants to hear it,” is Shiro’s simple reply. 

The scoff Lance gives him is immediate and honestly a little hurtful. “You’re an idiot if you think he’s not going to jump at the chance to forgive you.”

“I hurt him.”

“He loves you.”

Shiro almost laughs. The use of present tense is ridiculous at best.

But this feels like a deadlock, and Shiro is getting antsy, so he moves to rise out of the seat. Though he appreciates Lance’s perspective, he no longer wants to be having this conversation. But as he goes to step away, Lance snags the sleeve of his flight suit. 

“Shiro,” Lance says, “it’s not too late to fix this. Even to just be friends.” 

That’s unwarranted optimism if Shiro has ever heard it.

“I think that spaceship has flown,” he says, trying to pull his mouth into a smile. “It doesn’t really matter how I feel about Keith if I’m just going to keep being bad at relationships.”

Lance returns the smile with a frown. 

“Shiro,” he says carefully. Emphatically. “There’s no reason to be unhappy. You’re one half of the greatest love I’ve ever seen. Just because it’s taking you two a while to figure things out doesn’t make that any less true.

“Don’t let someone you love walk away from you if you can help it.”

A shiver passes down Shiro’s spine. Lance’s voice is too steeped in emotion for him to know what to say in response, so instead Shiro gives a nod and excuses himself. 

He ends up locking himself in the cramped cargo hold, just to find a place where he can breathe in without it being someone else’s air. 

* * *

_ The day before Shiro’s wedding, he stands alone in his bedroom and looks at himself in the mirror. _

This man is getting married _ , he thinks of the person regarding him with an equal intensity from the other side of the silver. It’s a hope he had barely ever allowed himself. Assuming that every day may be your last for years and years doesn’t birth many future dreams of nuptial domesticity. He had wondered more than once if driving Adam away had destroyed any prospect of ever walking down the aisle.  _

_ And yet here he is.  _

_ Disquiet stirs within his gut. More so when the door opens and closes behind him, and he turns to find his visitor has his hands shoved deep in his pockets, his eyes averted to the corners of the room, strolling as though he’d wandered in here on accident. _

_ “Hey,” says Shiro, smiling despite himself. Some things will always make him happy, no matter what.  _

_ “Hey,” replies Keith, and looks at him. Keith isn’t smiling, but that’s okay. He doesn’t need to.  _

_ He takes slow steps until he and Shiro are face-to-face. Shiro lets himself drag his eyes up the scar on his cheek. Time has yet to fade it at all, and Shiro is losing hope that it ever will.  _

_ “Can I help you with something?” Shiro asks.  _

_ Keith shrugs. “Just wanted to see you. And say, uh—” he looks around, visibly discomfited, “—congratulations.” _

_ “Thank you.” Shiro raises an eyebrow. “I’m not married yet, though. You can save the congratulations for tomorrow.” _

_ Keith bobs his head, nodding along to Shiro’s words, still not looking at him. Shiro’s vision catches on the sway of a strand of hair that’s fallen out of his low ponytail.   _

_ “I figured you’d be busy tomorrow,” Keith says. “Plus I’m leaving for my mission right after the ceremony. I probably won’t see you again.” _

_ The same bile that had crawled up Shiro’s throat when Keith had rejected his request to be his best man reignites its burn now. It doesn’t matter that their relationship has been made up of grit and empty air for the past year or so. There are just some things that you would expect the man you used as a framework to build your sense of security on to be in attendance for, and Shiro’s wedding reception was one of those things. _

_ He must see the heaviness of it in Shiro’s brow, because Keith lets out a small, “Sorry.”  _

_ “It’s okay,” Shiro says quickly, and tries to smooth out his expression. “You can’t stay even for a little bit?”  _

_ Keith stares at Shiro, stares  _ into _ Shiro, and says, “I really can’t.” _

_ A new feeling pours into Shiro’s lungs like they’re filling with water, and he immediately recognizes the burning bite of it as guilt. But Shiro has nothing to feel guilty for. He’s getting married tomorrow, to a man who makes him happy. He’s getting married tomorrow. He’s getting married tomorrow to a man who’s not Keith.  _

_ “Well good luck on your mission,” Shiro says, and tries his best to not make his tone sound like he’s spitting out the words between chewing a tough piece of meat.  _

_ “Good luck at your—” Keith takes a deep breath “—wedding.” _

_ He looks small in his casual Earth clothes, his hands still stuffed deep into the pockets of his black jeans, his shoulders rounded, his forehead creased and his mouth downturned. There’s such a ferocity burning inside of him that it’s borne fires in Shiro just via proximity, but right now something about him is washed out, drained away, leaving him dwindling.  _

_ Keith is sad, Shiro realizes. Shiro made Keith sad. _

_ Shiro will never be able to explain what makes him do it.  _

_ Shiro is not a bad man.  _

_ He’ll never find the words to articulate what possesses him in this moment, what surges through his veins into his fingertips, his mouth, his heart. It’s more than desperation and it’s more than fear. It’s not anxiety or regret or tension snapping. It’s the universe moving through him, cresting in him. It feels like if he doesn’t act, then he will end. His entire existence will cease. Like none of it, the pain, the war, the illness, the survival, the victory, will have been worth anything, if he doesn’t reach forward, grab Keith by the shoulders, and mash their mouths together.  _

_ A shocked gasp meets him, but Shiro doesn’t let go. He pulls Keith tighter, the pulse of his thundering heart rushing in his ears, Keith’s mouth wet and hot and opening under his. Part of Shiro feels gratified; part of Shiro wants Keith to split open so that he can crawl inside of him.  _

_ There’s a millisecond in which Keith kisses him back with an equal and opposite ferocity. Shiro feels it as it happens as the cosmos singing in his veins, as the stars locking into position, as all his fear and want and sadness shedding from him. He wants to keep this feeling, to nurture it, to grow it, to be surrounded by it. He wants to be protected and cared for.  _

_ He wants Keith. _

_ Keith tears himself away and pushes back.  _

_ “Stop!! Stop!” Keith is breathing hard, fury a living fire in his eyes. “What the fuck are you doing?” _

_ And Shiro just stands, dizzy and gaping, pain burning at the back of his eyeballs.  _

_ “You’re getting married  _ tomorrow _.” Keith is seething, his rage bubbling under his skin, shaking in his clenched fists. “I’m not your cold feet fantasy.” _

_ Shiro flinches.  _

_ “No, Keith, no, you’re not.” He takes a deep breath to steady his words, but he can’t keep the enormous lump in the back of his throat from leaking into his tone, making it tight and weak. He feels bewildered, so much so that he can’t even access his anger right now. “Keith you’re…. Please.” _

_ The plea makes something unlock in Keith’s brow, but he’s still hesitant and tentative in his next words. Shiro sees the frightened animal that a younger Keith was, a small cat backed into the corner with its hackles raised. “What are you doing?” _

_ “Let’s,” Shiro says, and then swallows, head still spinning. His voice is all rasp and desperation. “Let’s go somewhere. Away. Together.” _

_ The way Keith tenses up is traceable from his head to his toes, as though the meaning of Shiro’s words is making its way down his throat, over each vertebra, gathering in his gut and landing like lead in his legs. His eyes have blown wide, his lips parted in unmistakable shock. _

_ “Stop,” he says, his voice like tearing paper, like renting metal, like the plates of the Earth breaking apart. “Shiro. Stop.”  _

_ And Shiro takes those words. Takes them and internalizes him. Realizes if there ever was a chance, a window of opportunity, he’s missed it, let it slam shut in his face. And right now, he’s being asked to stop.  _

_ Shiro’s nothing if not respectful.  _

_ That’s it, then. Stop. Stop. Stop.  _

_ “You’re right,” he says, armoring himself in steely cold logic. In frozen pragmatism. In rigid morality. “You should go.”  _

_ He watches Keith leave the room. He watches the door slam shut behind him. And he watches the sky the next day when the Galra ship takes to the sky, forever speeding away from him. _

* * *

Lance wasn’t entirely wrong. Shiro does owe Keith an apology. The fact that there aren’t words to encompass the breadth of his regret, his guilt, his sorrow and his self-loathing never should have been the obstacle that Shiro had pretended they were in order to shield himself from his humiliation at his own actions. He owed Keith an apology the moment it happened, and every day since then has been compounded interest. Avoiding the situation hasn’t mitigated his guilt but exacerbated it.

At this point in his life, there’s nothing further to lose in this respect, and in the confines of this small spacecraft Shiro knows he holds Keith captive in a way that he normally doesn’t. The physical act of talking to him is right now the easiest it will have been in many years. It’s just the mental, the actual construction of sentences and phrases that will prove difficult.

But Shiro knows that he has to go now before he loses his nerve. He ducks into the cockpit again and takes a seat in the navigator’s chair, cutting off the voice in his head that’s trying to talk him out of it even as he does. Then he sits, stills and silent, rehearsing everything he wants to say but knows he’ll never be strong enough to in his mind, until he settles on just the right string of words that’s not invasive or pushy. Just enough that  _ hopefully _ Keith will have a neutral reaction to. Shiro doesn’t dare hope for positive. 

“Hey,” Shiro says, in a low voice pitched for the narrow space. 

When he doesn’t say anything else, Keith finally looks at him, his expression carefully blank. Shiro meets his eyes and holds firm contact, willing both himself and Keith not to look away. He takes a deep breath.

“I just wanted to apologize,” he says. “I made a lot of mistakes and I hurt you. I’m sorry.”

Keith turns his attention back to the starscape open before him. His eyes reflect the pinpricks of faraway suns and galaxies, and for only a second, Shiro allows himself to get lost in the way the light plays over the most perfect features Shiro has ever encountered in the entire universe.  _ How did I not fight for this? _

The moment stretches on until Shiro is certain Keith isn’t going to reply, and that’s okay. There’s no reason for Keith to forgive Shiro. As much as Shiro wants to pretend he’s not to blame for the destruction of the strength of their bond, he knows he was the driving force. If Keith doesn’t have it in him to let go of that, it’s perfectly understandable.

But then Keith opens his mouth.

“You never have to apologize to me, Shiro.” His voice quivers, and he swallows audibly. “I messed up too.”

A feeling jumps in Shiro’s chest, and the ice cased around his lungs cracks. 

It doesn’t fix anything. But it’s a start.

* * *

Their pod is the result of the matrimony of Altean technology and the best engineering Earth has to offer, with the Galra’s superior advancements mixed in. For a civilian craft with no weapons, it’s a speedy little thing, invented to catapult Earth squarely into the universal economy and political sphere. It’s not uncomfortable, even with five people and a giant wolf crammed into its seats, but it does help that these are the four people that Shiro has had to bare everything to in the past, even if he isn’t entirely on speaking terms with one of them at the moment. What’s a day on a small ship after years inhabiting the same energy wavelength? What’s a drop of water to an ocean?

What’s a tiny spacecraft to the neverending cosmos? 

Not much, they learn. The ship is fast, Lion-like fast, but it’s not instantaneous. Keith shouting Shiro’s name isn’t going to miraculously make them teleport over half the universe. Instead, they spend a leisurely day and a half speeding through open space, watching as the backwater solar system fades into the distance behind them. Space is dreary and empty before their eyes. 

Nothing really happens. Hunk prepares food. Pidge and Lance play a handheld game that’s enough to lift the distant gaze from Lance’s eyes just for a little bit. Keith curls up into himself to take naps in the pilot’s chair like a cat. Shiro makes the mistake of sitting beside him as he does, and finds his eyes tracing the curve of Keith’s barely-parted lips, the fan of the shadow of his eyelashes, the roguish slice of the scar across his cheek, more than he feels comfortable with. 

Keith’s body is not his to admire, and he’s made enough mistakes to ensure that he will never be. 

They creep closer and closer to the coordinates that Pidge insists line up with Keith’s findings, with her own brief research. There’s a weird buoyancy onboard that’s kept trapped under a jar like a firefly. No one wants their optimism because it opens the opportunity for disappointment, but they do trust each other. They truth Keith’s gut feelings and they trust Pidge’s scientific devotion, and if those two things are telling them that something lies at their destination it’s hard to trust your own self-preservational concern over that. 

They all spend a lot of time crowded into the cockpit staring into the far distance, as though at any moment Allura is going to magically appear before their ship. Shiro thinks that none of them realize that they’re doing it, or if they do they probably don’t realize  _ why _ . But it’s natural for them to want to see space spread out before them as they speed forward into it. They’re all pilots, after all. 

“We’re getting close,” Pidge announces from where she’s keeping Keith company in the front. 

Lance perks up, quicker than he probably intended. But Hunk is soon after him, and Shiro finds himself trotting after them to the front of the ship. 

Nothing is visible here, at least nothing in the proximity of the ship, and Shiro pushes down a sense of disappointment that there’s not anything gleaming at the edges of their visible range. He’s not sure what to expect, even if this does turn out to be a success. Is there some planet that the Lions will have taken refuge on, in this fantastical scenario where they’re still somewhere within this universe? Will they be hanging, lifeless and isolated, in empty space? Will it be all of them, gathered together in their pride, or just one?

Are they really going to find some hint, some trace, of Allura among them?

The answers to these questions don’t become apparent, even as the ship nears the coordinates. Everyone is on their tiptoes, bent forward towards the windshield and the screens displaying the ship’s surroundings. Keith’s knuckles are white with pressure around the controls, which Shiro knows because he’s only taken his eyes off of the swath of space before them to look at him, perched on the edge of his chair. Pidge toggles between viewports, switching her screen from exterior camera to exterior camera, zooming, panning, sweeping the area for any sign of anything besides open, empty space.

“We’re here,” Pidge says finally, with a bite of something sharp. 

They look. They stare through the windows, they examine the feeds. Pidge and Hunk boot up instruments for sensing magnetism, gravity, heat, biorhythms, light, the works. They circle the area, first at a tight distance, then at a larger loop, going slow, keeping their eyes peeled. 

The ship comes to a stop directly at the center of the coordinates. The cockpit goes quiet. Someone beside Shiro shuffles their weight, but Shiro is straining his eyes too hard towards the dark void of infinity to check or care who. All he sees is a primordial black, shifting with the distant dance of nebulas, pocked with the cold twinkle of stars so far they’ll never even know of his existence. Space is so large, and so empty, and Shiro’s eyes are just too weak to ever find the things he needs to find. 

Finally, Keith speaks.

“There’s nothing out here.”

The words are followed by another silence, but only because they’re so desperately wanted to be false. As though another second, another minute will prove him wrong, like the clouds just have to shift and the sun will peek out from behind them, present all along even though it was never visible. But the quiet seconds tick past, and space stays silent, cold, and empty. 

“This doesn’t explain the anomalies you photographed,” Pidge says, “or the data we picked up. There should be  _ something _ here.” 

“But there’s not,” Lance says, voice dark, bitter. It chips at Shiro’s heart.

Quiet fills the space again. It’s almost overwhelming, oppressive, the weight of their spent hope ballooning into the empty space vacated by sound. Shiro refuses to look at anyone, because he’s worried about seeing his own disappointment reflected in their eyes. They came all the way out here on a wave of optimism, and now they have to face the reality of the situation. 

“Alright,” Lance says. “Let’s get a move on. Not that this hasn’t been a blast but it’s time to go home.”

He’s not wrong, but no one wants to acknowledge it. 

The controls of the ship creak under Keith’s hands as he tightens his grip around them, and then lets his fingers go lax. Shiro is overcome with the sudden urge to put his hand on his shoulder, even as he fights back the lump in his own throat, but he knows that won’t help anyone. Not now and not ever. 

He doesn’t know what he was expecting, really. 

“Yeah,” Keith agrees in a quiet rasp of a voice.

This is all that was waiting for them, then. Keith readies the ship for long-distance high-speed flight again, his fingers trailing over the switches and buttons with a sort of hesitation and lethargy that Shiro’s never seen in them. The dashboard lights up. The engines buzz. 

“Wait wait wait,” Hunk says, just as Keith is powering on the hyperdrive. 

“What?” Keith snaps, yanking his hand back from the console.

“Do you still feel any energy, Keith?” Hunk asks, fiddling with some dials he has pulled up on his display. 

Though his expression is disgruntled, Keith takes a deep breath, shuts his eyes, and holds motionless, his hands settling onto his thighs as he slips into concentration. He barely shifts even as he breathes, the intensity of his focus held in every unmoving muscle of his body. Shiro pretends he can feel it as Keith reaches out, as though there’s any lingering connection between all of them left over from their days linked together mentally and physically. He pretends he can feel the brush of Keith’s mind like he used to when Keith would throw his consciousness outward, projecting towards their shared Lion. 

The moment stretches. Keith is very quiet and very still, and Shiro begins to think that this was just as futile as everything else that they’ve left Earth to do. 

But then, Keith nods. 

“It’s fainter now. But it feels almost like it  _ used to be _ here.” 

Craning to read the feed scrolling across Hunk’s screen, Pidge hums thoughtfully. “There is a strong quintessence residue here, even though there’s nothing giving off any energy.”

“Is it possible that the Lions  _ were _ here?” Shiro asks. “And then they went somewhere else?”

There’s a still and silent thread of light that strings its way through Shiro’s heart as Pidge examines her readouts.  

“Yeah,” Pidge replies. “In fact, I’d say that’s pretty likely.”

“But they’re  _ not _ here,” Lance says. “Who knows how long ago that could’ve been.”

“Actually,” Hunk says, “by these numbers it looks like we’ve only missed them by a few— _ whoa, Lance _ !”

The shock filling his voice makes everyone swivel their focus towards Lance, and Shiro feels all the breath leave his lungs at once. Lance’s eyes widen at the sudden attention, glancing between them.

“Holy shit,” says Pidge. 

“What?” Lance says, voice high-pitched with surprise. He brings a self-conscious hand to his cheek. “Is there something on my face?”

“Uh,  _ yeah _ ,” Hunk laughs. “There is!”

Keith turns in his chair and pulls up an internal video feed, focusing the camera on Lance. Lance takes a step closer to lean in towards the image, and Shiro gets a front row seat to the exact moment Lance realizes that his Altean markings, granted to him by Allura at the time of her death, are glowing.

They’re bright blue against his skin, radiant and strong, casting contrast on his face. His fingers quiver where they hover over his cheeks as he stares and stares, lips parted in clear disbelief. He barely looks like he’s breathing, his body shocked to stillness. He stands there for a long moment, glowing, watching. 

“ _ She was here _ ,” Lance breathes, and suddenly his eyes are filling with tears. 

He’s not the only one. Shiro feels strangely moved. He’s not sure why at first. This isn’t exactly new. They’ve seen Altean marks glow before, on Lotor and Allura near Oriande. The mark of the chosen. Somehow Shiro doubts that Lance is intended to be an Altean alchemist, and as far as any of them know they’re nowhere near any sort of Altean sacred land. 

But something in Lance’s expression, his demeanor has reversed so completely, it’s almost dizzying. Surprising. Inspiring. When he straightens up from peering at his own image, it’s with a ramrod spine and his fists clenched resolutely at his sides. It burns bright with the same intensity as his markings. 

“I think I can find her.” He shakes his head, and raises a hand to his face, skimming his cheeks with his fingertips. “I  _ know _ I can find her.”

On instinct, Shiro glances over at Keith, and finds him already looking back, already smiling. They exchange a big, familiar grin, hopeful, proud, and eager. 

“Then let’s go,” Shiro says. 

There’s a chorus of affirmations and a flurry of activity as they prepare for flight again. Lance has his hand pressed to his face, his brow furrowed and his eyes closed, but his lips are curved up into the first real smile Shiro has seen on him in a long, long time. 

“To Allura,” Keith says, booting up his controls. 

“To Allura!” the others echo. 

“But wait,” Hunk says, and they all stop in their tracks to look at him. “Doesn’t it feel like we’re missing someone?” 

There’s a long second of silence before everyone simultaneously agrees, “Coran.”

“Alright,” Keith says, gripping the throttle. 

“Next stop, Altea.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i wasn't joking about ariana grande

They don’t give him any warning. 

Pidge pings him from directly outside of his door in the new castle. They’re some of the few people in the universe who have clearance to waltz right in like they own the place. And they just about do own it, according to some passage in the New Altean constitution and their luxurious but unused rooms in the upper floors. So it isn’t until they’re all loitering in front of the door to Coran’s personal quarters that they come to a stop. 

And then it’s just a moment before the door is sliding open. They only see a sliver of him and then they see all of him, hooting and laughing and throwing one arm around Lance and the other around Pidge’s neck, pulling them into a vertebrae-disaligning hug. 

It’s really nice, Shiro thinks, that Coran is never not excited to see them. Even when Shiro’s friends are subjecting him to his own personal hell by dragging him on a likely-doomed space road trip, even when his husband has left him, even when the man he’s spent most of his life quietly in the gravity of still only responds to him in monosyllables and short phrases, it’s nice to think that there is someone in the universe who will unconditionally welcome him with untempered enthusiasm. 

The six of them gather around the sitting room in his quarters, comfortably taking up room on the couch and in chairs that in the immediate months after the war had been worn down by familiarity. Some subconscious, instinctive part of Shiro zeros in on Keith and automatically looks to settle down beside him before he realizes what he’s doing and picks a seat on the couch across from him instead.

“This is certainly a surprise!” Coran crows as he enters from the kitchen, tray in his hands laden with some mysterious steaming liquid in small cups. Shiro takes one gratefully from Coran, but after a single sniff at the contents places it on the side table without tasting it. “I wasn’t expecting to see you lot for another seven phoebs!”

A twinge of guilt sounds in Shiro’s chest at that. He isn’t sure when gatherings with his closest friends became nothing but mandatory annual meetings, saved only for special occasions. He didn’t mean it to end up this way. If the sideways looks Hunk and Pidge are sliding in each other’s directions are any indication, they feel about the same. 

And he isn’t entirely sure how to let Coran gently know they’re not here for a chat over tea, either, but someone else has that covered.

“We have to tell you something,” Keith says as Coran nudges past his knees. “You should sit down.”

Since the discovery in open space, spirits have been strangely high, and Shiro finds himself reluctantly caught up in it. Although Lance’s cheeks have stopped doing their best impression of a neon sign, he’s maintained that when he focuses he can dip into the flow of some sort of energy, of traces of Altean alchemy. Like as reported by Hunk, Shiro has caught Lance closely examining his reflection in a mirror on the way here more than once, but his expression stays determined and steadfast.

Shiro hasn’t seen Lance like this in years. It’s partially upsetting, coming face-to-face with the unavoidable truth that Lance has spent all his time since the war in a haze of depression. But it also means that he’s being lifted up out of it, which is the best direction that one who finds themselves at the bottom can want to go in. 

But they’re all still only armed with faith, which is a flimsy weapon against the infinity of space.

In accordance with Keith’s request, Coran does sit, his squinted eyes darting among them as though he’s expecting a fight. What he should be expecting is possibly worse. Shiro is reminded, yet again, that Coran was the only one out of the six of them who never got a chance to say goodbye. He knows that Coran has lived with the same sort of crushing grief that all of them carry, though intensified by a glut of tragedies that Shiro can’t even begin to imagine the weight of. Given that Coran had sworn himself to protect Allura, that she was the only remaining member of his family and of his ancient life, Shiro thinks that Coran’s sadness probably outweighs all of theirs. Even Lance’s. 

It’s hard to have to give him the same hope that Shiro himself has been grappling with, when they don’t know what the outcome of this is going to be. But Shiro knows there’s nothing better than open honesty in these situations. He levels a look at Coran.

“We think we found something,” he says, “that may point to the Lions’ whereabouts.” 

He waits for Coran’s eyebrows to raise, for him to lean forward in his chair, before swallowing, taking a deep breath, and continuing. 

“What’s more, we have reason to believe that Allura may still be alive, and she could be with them.”

There’s an uncharacteristic stillness to Coran’s response, how he freezes and stares at Shiro. The time Shiro had to return to the Castle of Lions and inform him that Allura had been taken away by the Galra when they’d infiltrated their ship comes to his mind all of a sudden. This should be the opposite of that moment, and yet Shiro somehow fears the weight of Coran’s emotion. 

But then Coran drops the tenseness, laughs, and sticks his pinky into his ear, presumably to clean it. 

“Sorry, Shiro, could you say that again?” he says. “Don’t think I caught it right the first time.”

Before Shiro can speak, Keith leans forward.

“Allura is alive,” he states, loudly. 

Shiro’s head whips around. “We don’t  _ know _ that—” 

“She is,” Lance says, exchanging an affirming look with Keith. 

Shiro’s not in the mood the fight, and it seems like the words have already made their way into Coran’s head anyway. 

“That’s—” Coran glances wildly from him, to Keith, to each of them in turn. His eyebrows are low and his eyes are wide and full of some emotion Shiro can’t name but he can feel. “That’s impossible! You— She—” 

As Coran sputters, Lance stands and goes to his side. He puts his hand on his shoulder and soothes him with a smile. 

“I know she’s out there,” Lance says. He raises the hand that’s not on Coran’s shoulder to his own face, touching his cheeks. “She gave me these and now I can feel her. I think she’s telling me where she is.”

Shiro doesn’t think he’s ever seen Coran shocked so wordless before, but here he is now, gaping at Lance. There’s probably a struggle going on within his mind right now that Shiro is intimately familiar with. The fear of hope, the reluctance to take this as good news, but the intense aching desire to want to believe it’s true and throw himself wholly into it. 

It’s evident on his face the moment he looks around, realizes who he’s talking to, and decides to put his future happiness into their hands. His eyes go glassy and wet, but in the same moment, his eyebrows lower into a gaze of determination. He stands, shoulders back, chin up, and dusts himself off. 

“Well, what are we waiting around here for?” he asks. “Let’s—” He pats himself down. “Let’s—” His mouth trembles. “Oh, quiznack,” he says, and falls back to his seat on the couch, his face in his hands. 

It’s the display of a man who has had infinitely many things torn from his hands and doesn’t know how to respond to being offered one of them back. Eventually, your joints get tired and weak from trying to cling to the things that matter to you, and you wonder if your fingers will even have the strength to wrap around them anymore. 

Hunk rises from his chair and nears Coran, his broad hand coming to rest on the shoulder that Lance isn’t currently inhabiting. 

“It’s a lot, man,” Hunk says, patting him on the back. “I know.”

Coran sniffles into his palms, and everyone watches on in silence.

There’s no way to ease this. In theory, it’s good news, but it inflicts emotional damage nonetheless. There’s nothing anyone can do for Coran at this point other than letting him work through it. It’s kind of like the rest of their lives, in that respect. There’s nothing any of them can do for each other but watch on as they cry. 

It isn’t the first time one of them has such an open display of emotion in front of the others, and Shiro is not naive enough to think it’ll be the last, so waiting for it to end isn’t quite awkward so much as empathetically painful. When Coran does finally raise his head, wiping salt stains from his cheeks, he looks to Lance first and gives a small nod before climbing to his feet and clearing his throat. He shakes himself loose, and takes a deep breath.

“Are you coming with us?” Pidge asks carefully.

“Are gorlian beloxes ticklish?” Coran counters, looking at her with a manufactured sharpness. “Of course I’m coming!”

He casts about himself, as though looking for a jacket to throw on, as though they’re going to leave this room right now and board a ship and find Allura waiting for them in the next system over. Sadly, Shiro doesn’t think it will be that simple. 

This must occur to Coran too because he stops short. When he looks up at Shiro, his eyes are still misty. 

“Ah, but I can’t just leave Altea like this!” Coran says. “I’ll need to place a few calls. Oh, and send a number of messages. Write a missive or a dozen!” 

He ducks his head and continues to mutter to himself. It’s enough to make Shiro’s throat tighten, and he turns to the rest of the group.

“Why don’t we go to dinner while Coran is handling this stuff?” Shiro says. 

This earns him a grateful look from Coran, which is enough for Shiro to be okay with them spending an extra night not working relentlessly towards their goal. Surely Allura, wherever she might be, is patient enough to wait for Coran’s mental health. 

“Good idea!” Hunk chimes in. “I think Pidge knows a place.”

They excuse themselves from Coran’s quarters with promises to be back by the end of the evening, following Pidge out into the streets of the city surrounding the castle. It looms majestic over the new growth of civilization on the planet’s surface, and they all keep their eyes carefully downturned to avoid looking at the statue that stands proud outside its walls. On a good day, Shiro has a hard time looking at it without tears. Today is not a good day. 

The establishment where they sit down for dinner isn’t crowded, but it feels crowded when they’re instantly recognized for who they are. They ask the hostess for a table near the back, but she herself seems unable to stop herself from asking for Pidge’s autograph and a photo with the group. They allow it like any good war heroes, but Shiro can’t imagine that any of their expressions are too happy in the picture. By the time their entrees are on the table, the bathroom line has a rubbernecking problem. 

As a result, Lance orders them all shots of a tangy Altean liquor and they toast loudly, “To being zoo animals,” which at least makes the staring more subtle, if not disappear completely. But it also makes them care less, not just about the attention they’ve drawn by existing together in public for the first time in years, but also about things in general, and the feeling is so good Keith subsequently treats them all to two bottles of his favorite Galran wine. 

In the end, they stay seated chatting at their table so long that the overheads lights dim around them and the volume of the bassy music rises. The bartender and the hostess clear the space in the center of the room, and before their curious eyes, dancers begin to fill the floor.

“I guess we have no choice but to stay and drink now,” Lance says, and his tone is so lighthearted nobody has the strength to even consider refusing him. 

So suddenly there’s another glass of something in Shiro’s hand, and he doesn’t know what it is but the bubbles in it are gentle enough to make his palate feel clean. He thinks based on the volume maybe it isn’t the sort of drink you’re supposed to down in one go, but right now he doesn’t care much and lets it all slide down his throat. He ends up sitting at the bar with Hunk, who has made friends with the bartender in a gambit to watch him prepare as many of the house’s specialty drinks as possible. Then there’s another glass in front of Shiro and he’s not sure how it got there, but he won’t look a gift horse in the mouth. He drinks half in a single gulp. 

“So get this,” Shiro overhears Lance loudly saying to Keith and Pidge, standing behind him. “The Altean orgasm can last up to two hundred and fifty ticks, and it can only be triggered by stimulating both the genitals and a spot at the base of the skull.”

“Ugh, Lance,” Pidge replies, and she sounds overloud. “That’s gross and actually really fascinating.”

Shiro’s not sure that any of them really needed to know that but he also can’t find reason to be bothered. He finds himself strangely glad that they’re here. Here, on Altea. Here, in this bar. He’s just drunk enough to admit to himself his infinite trust in Lance and Keith. If they think there’s time tonight to get trashed at an Altean bar, then he believes them. And after seeing the husk of what the Paladins once were on that tiny pod on their way out to find Allura, Shiro draws strength from assigning himself the duty to make sure they never return to that, if he can help it. 

It feels good, plain and simple. It’s nice to be around friends. It’s nice to be letting go in a way that doesn’t feel like sliding his heart through a shredder, like shoving his soul into a garbage disposal. He feels it not only buzzing inside of him but on the faces of his companions. They’re all together for the first time in a very long while for a reason that doesn’t involve painful memories and years of hacking through trauma. Shiro’s drunkenness was not begotten by an incapacity to deal with what’s going on around him, and there’s not even the slightest sliver of desire in him to sleep with any of the people eyeing him from around the room in a fit of self-destruction. 

Instead, there’s dancing. 

It starts with Lance, just like everything of this nature does. He pulls a begrudging but loose-limbed Pidge onto the dance floor and twirls her until she loudly threatens to puke on him. Hunk cuts in with the complaint that that’s usually  _ his _ thing, and simultaneously entertains and mortifies Pidge with his best rendition of the lawn sprinkler. 

This frees Lance to find another victim, and though he first begins to saunter in the direction of where Shiro knows in his hindbrain that Keith is leaned against the bar in casual conversation with a group of Olkari, his eyes lock onto Shiro on the way. He changes his trajectory and barrels into Shiro with a one-armed hug that becomes a firm pull in the direction of the floor.

Shiro is drunk enough to let himself be tugged. He laughs at whatever Lance is saying, because even if his comprehension is lost in the din of the bar Lance’s words strike as funny. 

None of them are particularly good dancers. Especially not in settings like this. Lance has some movement in his hips that the others could only hope to mimic, but the floor is too open for him to look like anything but a fool. Shiro is more than aware of his own ridiculous motions but has had enough alcohol that he no longer cares. He allows himself to be led in what a slurred-voiced girl in the circle next to them claims is an ancient Altean line dance, even though some part of him is aware that there’s probably no such thing (because, if there was, Coran would have already taught it to them).

The soundtrack for the evening is an eclectic mix of sounds Shiro can only describe as intergalactic. He would bet that most of it is Altean in origin, making Earth dance moves ill-suited to the uneven beat, but more than one song comes on that he’s sure he’s heard when he attended a dinner hosted for a party of visiting diplomats from the Ylid Sector. Most of it flows through his inebriated brain without notice, but eventually, something starts to sound familiar. 

“Is this some—” Shiro struggles to gather his thoughts, blinking against his blurry-edged vision. “Some…some old Earth song?” 

“Come on, Shiro,” Lance says. “This is a classic. I  _ know _ you know every word to this.”

Shiro laughs, louder and harder than he means to. “You caught me.” 

“Sing!” Pidge shouts, and then it’s only a matter of time before Hunk is chanting the same word at him. So, swaying to the beat, Shiro puts on his best early 21st-century white girl voice. 

“ _ Thank you, next. I’m so fucking grateful for— _ ”

Something catches Shiro’s eye. There’s a sliver of a smile hidden behind a half-full glass, gone before it’s there. Shiro’s attention drifts to its owner’s eyes and when contact is made he loses a game he didn’t know he was playing. 

His feet carry him before he can stop them. It’s the alcohol, maybe. Or the bottled-up emotions. Possibly a lethal combination of the two. 

“Don’t wanna dance with everyone?” Shiro opens with, because his mouth is casual and comfortable after the wine. 

Keith snorts. Shiro finds his eyes drawn to the loose, soft in places in his face where he’s only seen hard planes recently. 

“It’s not really my thing.”

“C’mon,” Shiro says. “It could be just like that time at the Kerberos pre-launch gala when we both tripped while dancing together and I crashed into Iverson’s table and flipped it.”

Keith laughs, apparently despite himself, because he clamps a hand down over his mouth immediately after the first full-bellied  _ ha _ comes out. It should trigger something in Shiro, some pain, some discomfort, some sympathy, but all he can think in the moment is that Keith with his eyes bugged out from shock at his own mirth is so,  _ so _ cute. Keith laughing at all is beyond adorable. Something in Shiro’s heart soars at even the echo of the sound of it, and something is glowing deep within him that’s been long dormant. 

The hand slips off Keith’s mouth, and Shiro is thrilled to see that there’s still the curl of a smile in its wake. He looks up at Shiro, not completely unguarded, but at least willing to take part in that memory. 

“That was a pretty good time,” he allows. 

Shiro realizes they’ve both gone completely still on the edge of the floor as the others continue jumping and thrashing nearby. Part of him wishes he was more sober to appreciate this feeling, just one more time. Of the world narrowing down to two people. And not just any two people, but him and Keith. As it always was, for such an enormous, impactful section of his life. But the other part of him allows that this would’ve never happened if there wasn’t some liquid courage to lubricate the roughness they’ve spent the past few years letting build between them.

There’s a smile on Shiro’s face, too. And they both stand there. Smiling. Looking. 

Shiro feels heat in his cheeks, and wonders if he looks as much like a schoolboy giddy with his first crush as he feels.

“I’m gonna grab some water,” Keith finally says, and the tone is less harsh than any Shiro has heard from him in a long time. When he slides out of Shiro’s space, it doesn’t feel like a goodbye, but a see you later. 

* * *

 

_ “Shiro...Takashi,” Curtis says, and the sigh is long-suffering. “What are you doing?”  _

_ There’s no reason to feel defensive. Shiro isn’t being attacked, and Curtis definitely isn’t an aggressor. But the urge to speak sharply, hold his ground, begins to rise in him anyway, and Shiro has to tamp it down before it comes pouring out of his mouth.  _

_ “I’m just looking,” he says, and it’s true.  _

_ He is looking. The rooftop space that the two of them had been so ecstatic about when they’d first toured the house remains completely unfurnished, but that doesn’t mean Shiro doesn’t use it. He had assumed that Curtis didn’t know that he ever came up here. But he does come up here, now and last night and often. He sits against the cold ground with his head tilted back almost to his shoulders.  _

_ “Takashi,” Curtis says again, and it’s a lament. “Do you want me to grab some chairs?”  _

_ No. No, more than anything, this is what Shiro deserves. To watch the scant cosmos above through light pollution and clouds with his ass and hands freezing against the concrete. But most importantly, he’s not in the mood for company.  _

_ “It’s okay,” Shiro says, and makes no attempt to offer a compromise.  _

_ Curtis sees it for what it is, despite Shiro’s politeness. It doesn’t stop him. His footsteps tap along to where Shiro is, and then his legs fold beneath him as he sits. _

_ “You know,” he says slowly. “You could go back.”  _

_ Shiro raises the corner of his mouth in a peace offering. “We have a life here.”  _

_ “I could go with you,” Curtis offers, even though they both know that that’s not the issue.  _

_ “No,” Shiro says. “I’m happy just watching.” _

_ Though he knows, somewhere in his heart, that lie is the beginning of the end, or the foundation for all other lies to be built upon.  _

* * *

 

Shiro’s lack of a hangover is a miracle to rival the first awakening of the Atlas, or Zarkon’s death at Lotor’s hands.

Lance wasn’t so lucky, and as he boards the spacecraft he’s got one white-knuckled fist in a very patient Kosmo’s fur and Coran’s bicep clenched in his other hand for balance. He’s bitching and moaning about sunlight on Altea, something that stops the instant Keith calls his name from the cockpit to ask if he can help navigate. 

Shiro, for some reason, feels a pang of regret when Lance eagerly pushes his way to the front and claims the seat next to Keith. There’s no reason for it. It’s not as though the seat has his name on it, and it’s not as though the pilot has his name on it either. 

_ He could have _ .

Shiro shakes his head. Maybe the reason he’s not hungover is that he’s still drunk.

“Are you guys sure you know where we’re going?” Pidge calls to the front once they’re all settled in. Kosmo’s head is easily the size of an old-fashioned microwave and it’s a heavy warmth across Shiro’s thighs. He snuffs happily when Shiro scratches him behind an ear. 

There’s a pause, as though Lance and Keith are exchanging quiet words. And then Lance loudly proclaims, “I think so!”

“You  _ think _ so?” Hunk says. “You  _ think  _ you know where we’re going?”

But further backtalk is silenced by the rumbling of the engine, the sound of empty air growing beneath them as they prepare to break free of the atmosphere. 

“Keith did find that other place,” Shiro points out, for his own benefit as much as Hunk’s. 

“And Lance glows,” Hunk says. “I know, I know. I just—” His eyes cut sideways to where Coran is seated, watching Altea recede in a viewport, and lowers his voice “—I don’t want to be running all over the whole universe looking for something we don’t even know for sure exists.”

Shiro is with Hunk on that, one hundred percent. He refrains from agreeing out loud out of respect for Lance, though. And Keith. In whom Shiro has decided to put his trust. 

The hours slip by in an Altean card game that Coran had taught them once a long time ago when they had free moments on the Castle-ship. But Shiro’s recollection of the rules is rusty at best, and it’s complex and self-contradictory to the point where he wonders if Coran is making everything up as they go along.

Right after a particularly bad losing hand, Lance’s raucous laughter diverts Shiro’s attention to the cockpit. He can’t see from here, but he feels a pulse of want, the same kind he would feel as a cadet staring up at the enormous rockets that he was determined would someday take him away from the surface of Earth. He wants to know what’s so funny. He wants to see if Keith is laughing too. He wants.  _ He wants. _

It’s a terrible thing, and he feels no self-respect, but as he hands the cards back to Coran to shuffle he rises from his seat and excuses himself. He doesn’t know where he’s going until he’s gotten there. Until he’s hanging in the entryway of the cockpit, staring down at Lance seated sideways in his chair with his legs extended and draped over the armrests so that he can nudge Keith’s thighs with his toes.

Lance doesn’t look surprised to see him. He retracts his legs and straightens up. 

“Hey Shiro,” he says, expression open and pleasant. 

Keith’s expression isn’t too different, when Shiro lets himself look over at it. In fact, he’s looking up at Shiro with those enormous dark eyes and without a hint of his customary frown, and it has Shiro’s heart squeezing. 

He must take a beat too long to respond, spend a tick too long returning Keith’s stare, because Lance says, “Ooookay,” and rocks himself to his feet. “I’ll leave you two to it then.”

He pushes past Shiro into the passenger cabin, giving Shiro no choice but to awkwardly sit down beside Keith in the copilot’s chair. 

The air doesn’t feel as littered between them, not full of smoke and grit and the debris they left behind when they broke apart before the wedding. It’s a relief, this lungful of fresh air, and Shiro takes a moment to simply bask in it. To study the fuzzy outline of Keith’s reflection in the windshield. To feel his presence, calming and sure.

And the best part is that Shiro feels comfortable enough now to open his mouth and speak.

“Do you really know where we’re going?” he asks in a low voice.

Keith shrugs. “I’ve got a feeling, and so does Lance. We’ve got Pidge running some data. Between the three of us, we’ll figure it out.”

Given that neither Keith nor Lance seem uncertain about this, he lets the matter drop.  _ You’ve seen weirder, Takashi, _ he reminds himself.

Taking both his eyes and his hands off the console, Keith turns in his chair to look at Shiro. More important to him right now than nudging constant adjustments to their course, it seems, is examining Shiro’s face. Then Shiro’s neck, Shiro’s chest clothed in the beige sweater Pidge shoved into his bag on Earth, Shiro’s prosthetic, Shiro’s other arm. 

Shiro doesn’t— _ can’t _ —miss the way that Keith’s eyes jump to his left hand, and then back up to his face. There’s a purse to his lips that makes Shiro think he won’t say anything, and maybe at some point in his life, he wouldn’t have. But this Keith can’t seem to help himself, even as he leans back in his chair and crosses his arms over his chest. 

“You’re not wearing a ring,” he notes, and though his tone is cool and unruffled the fact that he commented on it at all says more than his words. 

“I’m not,” Shiro agrees. “I got divorced.”

“I, uh,” Keith says, looking away for a moment. “I heard.”

So he knew already. 

Of course he knew already. It’s not like he’s been cut off from civilization. Shiro isn’t exactly the low-profile individual he desperately wishes he could be. He would have heard about it through some alien talk show radio chatter, some gossip rag with Shiro’s pixelated face plastered over it at the checkout line in a store, some broadcast program’s oblique reference to it. Or, of course, from their vast network of mutual friends and acquaintances. 

For a moment, Shiro thinks that’s the extent of their conversation. As though Keith had just wanted to point out the obvious. Maybe meant as a subtle jab in some direction or another that Shiro is too emotionally exhausted right now to parse. 

But Keith doesn’t build conversations on subtleties. 

“Do you want to talk about it?” Keith asks, extending a sort of opening that usually remains tacit with him. 

Shiro sighs. “Not really,” he says truthfully.

But despite his answer, more words bubble up on their own. 

“We weren’t right for each other,” he says. “We didn’t know each other very well when we got engaged. It was such a spur-of-the-moment thing. And we wanted such different things from our futures.”

Keith is quiet. He gazes, appraising. 

“It’s okay,” he says. “You already know the right person wouldn’t ask you to choose between what you want and what they want.”

Shiro can’t help but laugh good-naturedly, even against the quiet tone of the conversation. “When did you get so wise?”

The smile that Keith allows himself is small, but it’s enough to let Shiro know his next words are joking and not intended to be barbed. “Sometime between when my best friend left me for another man and now.” 

Defensiveness is Shiro’s first instinct given that framing of the situation, but he doesn’t want to crash through the lighthearted way that Keith seems willing to discuss it right now. Joking is not the worst way to heal. He lets the comment settle and embraces it, sporting a sheepish, self-deprecating smile in Keith’s direction. 

He turns his attention towards the window again. 

“I think Curtis knew I was doomed to spend the rest of my life mooning over someone else, anyway,” he says. 

It’s a dangerous admission. But there’s no use in holding back anymore when he’s already lost it all. 

Keith doesn’t say anything in response, and it’s neither an acceptance or a denial of Shiro’s words. He just lets them rest. 

It’s almost comfortable, in the way that nothing is anymore. And Shiro nearly finds himself smiling. 

* * *

 

“What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you see Allura?” Lance asks. “I’m probably gonna cry. And hug her.”

They’re seated around a too-small table in an otherwise empty restaurant on an artificial moon. It’s a way station for intergalactic travel passing through this quadrant, and Shiro is more than a little amused by its uncanny resemblance to a highway rest stop on Earth. 

They could spread out to other tables instead of crowding into this booth made for a couple fewer people, or perhaps four fewer people if those people have tentacles, but there’s a comfort in proximity that Shiro hasn’t felt in a long time. Somehow in his life lately he’d come to patiently tolerate companionship instead of appreciating it, but the sort of smile that’s been tugging at the corner of his mouth for the past few hours is one he missed.

Lance’s statement does make him a little uneasy though. 

“I’ll hug her too, probably,” Keith says from behind the spread of a menu. Shiro doesn’t know how much of it he can actually read, given that it’s not in English or any other language Shiro recognizes. Regardless, Shiro’s grateful for the barrier between them, no matter how flimsy. The fact that Keith is directly across the small stretch of sticky table from him sparks little pangs of excitement in his chest that he wishes he could push down, but that’s nothing compared to how he feels when Keith’s toes accidentally tap against his own. Multiple times.

The both of them have long legs, and this situation won’t let Shiro forget it.

“ _ If _ we find her,” Pidge says, “I want to ask her more about the physics of realities. Maybe I can finally get a scientific understanding of exactly what happened that day.”

“You’re going to do that before you  _ hug _ her?” Hunk asks, appalled, putting down the jar of bright orange condiment he’d been closely inspecting.

“It’s no fun if all our answers are just  _ hug her _ !”

“But we do all want to hug her, correct?” Coran asks. 

The waiter comes by, and the table leaves the ordering to Coran, Hunk, and Keith, who apparently  _ could _ read the menu. Shiro would have room to be impressed if he wasn’t busy trying to figure out exactly what a “polylimbed oxyrodent” is and why Coran just ordered one as an appetizer. 

It’s more of the same through dinner. “I can’t wait to show her more of Earth,” Lance says. And, “It’s going to be really nice to have her around again.” And, “Do you think she’ll like the statue we had made of her?” 

These conversations roll. Coran chimes in with his agreements, his speculations on Allura’s likes, dislikes, and desires. He gets misty-eyed in an optimistic way. Hunk and Keith add their own two cents here and there. Pidge does what she does best and weaves Lotor’s name into the conversation, causing Lance’s shoulders to rise up to his ears and his voice to rise in pitch and volume. 

“I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about there,” Pidge says when she’s done laughing at him. “Allura loved you a lot, Lance.”

Lance’s face goes as pink as the guts of whatever Shiro’s been eating for the past fifteen minutes. 

It’s almost awe-inspiring, in a way. The tenacity of Lance’s feelings for Allura. How death and years gone by haven’t even left a scratch on them. How the mention of her can still tinge his ears with red. How he stammers when he talks about the potential of bringing her home to his family again, of maybe someday putting a ring on her, of staying beside her for as long as he can. 

The thought makes Shiro look up from his food, and Keith is already looking back at him. They both drop their gazes like eye contact is an electric shock. 

Spirits are still high when they leave the restaurant. They’re all full and sated, legs stretched, prepared for another many vargas of travel cooped up inside the hold of their pod.

But Shiro makes a point to catch up to Lance, to touch him gently on the elbow, to lean his head down and speak to him in his ear. 

“Can I talk to you for a second?” Shiro asks. 

Lance looks up at him curiously, but they both slow their pace to fall back a length behind the group.

“What’s up?” he asks.

Shiro doesn’t want to have to say this, but he knows that someone should. He’s not going to let responsibility for the team fall by the wayside again. 

“Lance,” Shiro says quietly. “I appreciate your enthusiasm but have you stopped and thought about what might happen if we don’t find her out there?”

He knows it’s the wrong thing to say to Lance the minute he sees his expression transform before him. 

“You really think we won’t?” Lance asks, his voice small.

“I don’t think we  _ won’t _ ,” Shiro says. “I just don’t really know what’s going to happen. And I need you to be open to every possibility.”

Lance frowns deeply, a crease growing between his eyebrows. It hurts to think about, Shiro knows, but the last thing he wants to deal with is a Lance who has fallen even farther down the dark hole of his depression. Shiro fears that there are some things he’ll never be able to recover from. 

“Divorce really did a number on you, huh?” Lance grumbles. 

Shiro inhales sharply. “I’m sorry,  _ what _ ?”

“You don’t have to be so moody and pessimistic all the time just because you don’t have a husband anymore,” Lance replies, nose up. 

“That’s out of line, Lance,” Shiro snaps.

Lance stops short and spins on Shiro, blue eyes filled with a deep sadness, but face stony and ungiving. Shiro stops with him, shoulders raised and squared against whatever Lance is about to say to him, because from the look on his face it’s going to be  _ something _ .

“What happened to the guy who always had a pep talk?” he asks. 

Shiro frowns. “I—” 

“No no no,” Lance says, with an exaggerated ‘ _ shut up _ ’ snap of his hand to go with his hiss. “What happened to the guy who thought we could do anything? The young Garrison pilot who wouldn’t stop until he broke every record? The leader who believed in his team?” Lance jerks a thumb in Keith’s direction. “What happened to the guy who wouldn’t hear a contrary word about following exactly what  _ that _ jerkwad had to say, even when everyone else was against him?”

The air leaves Shiro’s lungs. Lance crosses his arms and looks Shiro up and down. 

“I want our Black Paladin Shiro back,” Lance says. “Let me know when you’ve found him.”

Lance spins in place and takes long, purposeful strides to catch up to the others, patting Coran on the back and clasping a hand down on Pidge’s shoulder when he gets there. Shiro watches him go, and feels the pain like his ribs are cracking apart. 

The Black Paladin Shiro hasn’t existed for a long, long time. He’s gone now. He’s seen too many things. Been too many people. Died just once, and once is one time too many to go on living. 

But Shiro misses him as much as the others do. 

* * *

 

Lance lets him have the cockpit with the air of someone who’s pretending not to see Shiro, let alone care. That’s all well and good with Shiro, who can use the space from the others to sort through his thoughts. He’s not entirely sure why being with Keith doesn’t count as being with “the others”, but it’s a place historically reserved for him so Shiro tries not to overthink it. 

Other than not-unfriendly greetings, they’re quiet for a long time as Keith steers. Somewhere deep inside of him Shiro still isn’t convinced that he knows where he’s going, but Keith seems to have some sort of idea. He shows no signs of concern or indecision as he shifts their heading. 

It’s more than self-confidence. It’s an incredible peace with his own conviction. Shiro feels something stir within him when he thinks about how much Keith has grown from the boy who hid his pain behind a feral attitude. Without being egocentric, Shiro knows he fostered some of that in Keith himself. And at some point, Keith kept moving forward while Shiro pinned himself back.

“Something on your mind?” Keith asks, and it startles Shiro. The way his voice is low, pitched for the two of them. It’s such a mundane question, but it twists Shiro’s insides, obliterates him to dust. 

He needs to take a moment to center himself before answering. 

And when he does, he has to clear his throat, and dispose of his own awkwardness with a laugh, self-derisive and dry and humorless. “Lance chewed me out earlier.”

“Yeah?” The corner of Keith’s mouth tweaks upwards. Shiro would find the smirk beautiful if it wasn’t at his expense. If he didn’t think that Keith and Lance had probably at some point, in these very same seats, had a lengthy conversation about their opinions on Shiro and his current mindset.

Except, yes, even with that, he still finds it beautiful.

“What’d you do to him?” Keith asks. 

Shiro rubs at his forehead and sighs. “I was just trying to be practical. He’s got his heart so set on finding Allura. I don’t know if he’s going to be able to recover from this if it turns out she’s gone.”

Keith’s smirk disappears, and a frown takes its place. Shiro had expected to disappoint him with his view on the situation, but seeing it happen in front of him is another matter entirely, and it jabs straight to Shiro’s heart. Even as Keith leans back in his chair and stares out into the cosmos passing them by, he looks thoughtful. He chews on the inside of his cheek, and Shiro knows he’s looking for words. 

“He’s not going to give up on her,” Keith says, slowly. “He knows he can find her. You can’t trust him on this?” 

“It’s not that I don’t trust him,” Shiro says quickly. “I just want to be prepared for the worst-case scenario.”

Keith shuts his eyes and tilts his head back, and Shiro watches him, watches the way breath passes between his barely-parted pink lips, watches the feathered curl of his eyelashes where they rest above his cheekbones. He watches the way his calloused fingers rest so at home on the controls of the ship, the way the lines of his body curve and sit like brushstrokes. 

“ _ I _ know she’s out there,” he says. “Are you going to give up on me, Shiro?”

That’s cruel. That’s cruel and unfair and Keith knows it and the worst part of all of it is that it’s not wrong. The words pass through Shiro like a shudder. 

Part of him wants to be angry. To lash out and say something digging and harsh in return. But that reaction in itself tells Shiro how much he should be paying attention to what Keith is trying to tell him. So instead he turns inwards, and starts to think. 

“Do you know where we’re going?” he asks again. 

“Yes,” Keith says. 

That’s all the answer Shiro should need, and he knows it. 

“Okay,” Shiro says, and tries his hardest to not make it sound patronizing when he tags on, “Good job, Keith.”

Keith doesn’t reply, but his shoulders relax. 

* * *

 

Keith powers down the steering system of the ship. Lance offers to fly while he’s sleeping, but he ends up bickering with Pidge about his piloting capabilities instead. By the time they’re done, there are six sleeping pads laid out in the hold, and everyone is too tired to want to do anything but lie down. 

From his spot on the floor, Shiro can see a sliver of space out the front viewport. It’s beautiful. He tries to remember what force ever tied him to the Earth besides gravity, and he can’t recall. Kosmo sniffles in his ear where he’s laid out between Shiro and Keith. Keith had offered Shiro a half-smile when he’d wandered over to the spread of blankets next to Shiro and settled down among them.

Shiro’s trying his best not to look into it. He knows he doesn’t deserve Keith’s olive branch, his friendship, with a solid lump of guilt that sits heavy in his stomach. But somehow, over all their years, Keith has wanted his, even when he’d far surpassed his need for it. 

There’s a lot of breathing in this small space. Hunk and Coran are both snoring like combustion engines. It’s not exactly the lullaby that Shiro needs to doze off, but something about it is intimate and personal. Aside from the occasional one-night stand who would stay over, it’s been a while since Shiro slept in the same room as other people. Even Curtis, after the first few months, spent more nights asleep on the couch in front of the TV than not. 

This is easy. This is peaceful. In this moment Shiro can ache with his wounds and his fear and his grief and the way he misses Allura, with the phantom feeling of a flesh and blood right arm, in all the parts of his chest that have been carved out by a war and a poorly-mended heart. He can allow himself to feel that, and to feel these presences around him, who are still here despite all that, despite all this pain and all these years. 

Maybe it’s the aftereffects of forming a magical robot superweapon, but something snaps into place. These are the puzzle pieces of his soul. 

Shiro sits up. In the dim starlight, he takes stock. He sees Keith curled up against Kosmo’s belly, his face buried against the wolf’s neck, long black hair escaped from its band and spilt like ink over the pillow. He sees Lance’s mouth hanging wide open, drool dripping from the corner and pooling beneath his face on the floor. He sees Pidge starfished half over Hunk’s sleeping area, leaving him jammed against the wall. He sees Coran mumble something utterly unintelligible into his pillow. 

Shiro realizes he was wrong.

There’s so much more you can do for people who are suffering than just watching. He had known that, once. Built the core of his interactions around it. 

You can offer them support. You can be there for them. You can stand by their sides. You can cry with them and share in their pain. 

You can believe in them. 

Shiro watches for a while, and eventually lays down and drifts to sleep with his left hand sunk deep into the fur over Kosmo’s shoulder. 

And when he wakes after an unusually undisturbed many hours, it’s to the sight of Keith propped up on one elbow, running his fingers aimlessly through a still-snoring Kosmo’s belly fur. His hair is tousled and knotted around his shoulders, his face is sleep-lined, but he’s looking down at Kosmo with a peace to his expression that rivals every sunrise Shiro has ever seen on any planet. 

There’s a curve to his cheeks which nothing else in nature can recreate. A new color purple was invented for the starlight that reflects from his eyes. Even the scar that stretches along the side of his face, though tragic, is beautiful, set against the rest of his skin in the most handsome way Shiro could ever imagine anything being. He parts his pink lips to breathe deep.

“ _ Wow _ ,” Shiro mouths unconsciously, and the motion must draw Keith’s attention because his eyes flit over. 

“Good morning,” he says, and his smile seems as instinctive as his breathing. 

Shiro can’t draw forth the words to reply, and just stares. 

But Keith isn’t even paying him any attention anymore, pushing himself off the ground and rising to his feet. Shiro can’t control himself. He rolls over to watch as Keith bends and folds the sleeping equipment, gathering it in his arms to put away. 

“I think we’re going to get somewhere today,” he says to Shiro, still in a whisper to respect the slumber of their companions, just before he returns to the cockpit. 

Shiro watches him go, and decides he doesn’t want to see Keith walk away from him anymore. He, too, hops to his feet and gathers the sleeping pad and blankets into a neat pile before stowing them. He leaves Kosmo with his ears twitching at something behind his eyelids, and joins Keith in the cockpit. 

In space, of course there’s no difference between night and day. The stars still shine all around you, suns of their own faraway systems, centers of what they tug in with their own gravity. But the atmosphere here is dawn-like, encouraged by the snoring of their friends, by the lights powered off in the main cabin. It’s quiet, slow, personal, and Shiro feels it as a softness all around him. 

Keith has yet to boot up the systems. He sits with his legs folded against his chest, his arms wrapped around the outside of his shins. He rests his chin on his knees and stares, and stares, and stares. 

Shiro stares too, and then, without a word, slips into the co-pilot chair. He lets himself be cocooned by their shared silence, knowing full well that he plans to break it in a second. But every moment spent comfortable with Keith is a moment that Shiro cherishes. He puts it off until he can’t stem the flow of words anymore. 

“I’m sorry,” is how it comes out. 

Keith sits up a little straighter, and looks at him in surprise. 

“You already said that,” he says. “I told you, you don’t have to apologize.” 

“No, but….” Shiro takes a deep breath. “Keith, let me. Let me apologize.”

The words stretch out into the quiet after he says them while Keith studies his face, as though the answer to some unasked question is going to reveal itself there. 

“I hurt you,” Shiro says, slowly. “I know I did.” 

“It’s not a big deal,” Keith says quickly, and that in itself is almost too much of a confirmation of Shiro’s statement for him to handle. 

“It  _ is _ a big deal.”

“Shiro,” Keith says, in a little, cracked voice. He swallows, and takes a deep breath. “I think we both made mistakes.”

Maybe that’s true, but Shiro can’t help but feel like he was the one to throw the first punch. In both a metaphorical sense and a literal one. Then again, it’s not about who starts the fight, but who ends it. Not that this is a fight, according to its strictest definitions, but Shiro needs to try to make a change, because he can’t live with the guilt and the yearning of this anymore. 

“We did,” Shiro agrees. “And I’m going to apologize for mine.

“This isn’t an excuse, but it was difficult for me. Confusing. You never told me what you wanted from me. And then you pushed me away. And I—”

The breath falls out of Shiro’s words as Keith levels him a look that could withstand nuclear detonations. It freezes Shiro up from the inside out, squeezing at his lungs. 

“You,” Keith says, “never told me that you loved me back.”

Shiro almost crumples, and leans on the only survival tactic he knows: self-defense. 

“There was a war. How could I say something like that to you?”

The words slip out before Shiro can control them. He knows the self-righteousness that stews behind them is built on assumptions. That they’re relevant only based on the presupposition that Keith had ever had any sort of romantic interest in Shiro. Which, like most things in Shiro’s life, Shiro oscillates in his view on with the changing of the calendar days. 

But Keith’s eyes are steady, almost cold in how they stare so stonelike and solid. “I said it to you just fine.”

And there’s Shiro’s answer. The one that shreds his organs to ribbons within him. That clenches at his bones. He realizes that this, here, is the core of the issue. The engine of the machine that eventually tore their relationship apart. 

“I know,” he says, helpless, hopeless, feeling like he’s gasping for air. “I know you did. I just— I...how could I  _ not _ love you, Keith?”

“You tell me.”

This just about rips the fight from him. He feels like he’s fallen from a great height. Shiro shakes his head and rubs the heel of his palm against his eye. “You also said I was your brother. How was I supposed to take that?” 

Keith's mouth opens, and then closes. “I thought you understood what I meant.” 

“I don’t know,” Shiro says. “I didn’t understand  _ anything _ . How could I be sure about how you felt about me when that was what I had to go off of?” 

Keith is quiet. 

“Look.” Shiro sighs. He aches. “I’m sorry, Keith. I’m so sorry I never told you. I did love you.”

Something swims in Keith’s eyes. Something that hurts Shiro to look at, but he makes himself look anyway, because he knows he deserves all the torment that seeing Keith in pain gives him. So much so that he wishes he could take it all upon himself. That whatever he inflicted on Keith turned around and hit him instead. 

“I loved you too,” Keith says quietly.

It is, unarguably, a past-tense statement. Time will heal this wound too, someday. 

Keith turns back to the controls. He begins to flip the power switches, and Shiro takes it to mean that their conversation is over. 

But Keith has one more thing to say. 

“It’s okay, Shiro,” is what it is. “It happened. It’s in the past. I don’t think our friendship has to suffer for this anymore.”

Their  _ friendship _ . As if that’s ever what this was. Friendship doesn’t even begin to cover a fraction of the relationship between them, and suddenly Shiro understands Keith’s use of the word “brother” with a startling clarity. There isn’t any statement or phrase that can contain what they were to each other, but that’s one that, at least, shows an aspect of being attached through an irreversible bond, that shows devotion and loyalty, that shows something beyond just  _ friendship _ . 

But at the end of the day, there’s nothing that connects them beyond the simple concept of friends.

“Yeah,” Shiro says. “Let’s go back to normal.”

When Shiro returns to the rear of the craft, everyone is up and about. Coran and Pidge are chattering cheerfully while Hunk prepares a basic meal, and Lance is lounged across one of the chairs like he’s about to take a 9 am nap. Shiro picks him to sit beside, and rests his face in his hands. 

“When did I stop loving Keith?” Shiro asks. 

Even with Lance sitting next to him, it’s not directed towards him. It’s mostly to himself. 

Lance replies anyway, cracking a disbelieving smile when Shiro raises his head. “Uh, did you ever?” He braces his forearm against Shiro’s shoulder. “Dude, do you not remember your bachelor party? Of course you don’t. You blacked out within the first hour and kept asking where Keith was.”

There are a lot of stories from that night, but this isn’t one that Shiro’s heard before. He frowns. 

“Keith wasn’t even there.” 

Lance laughs and raises his eyebrows at Shiro. “Exactly.”

So, really, what it comes down to is that the answer is still  _ never _ . 

“That’s what I thought,” Shiro says. 

* * *

 

“Hey,” Shiro says to Pidge. “Do you feel that?” 

She only glances up from her tablet for a second, where she’s scrolling fast through messages, tossing dozens into the trash without even opening them. 

“Feel what?” she asks. 

“I….” Shiro stops. It’s a good question. Feel  _ what _ ? Shiro wouldn’t be able to say. 

“Never mind,” he settles on, and taps absently at his prosthetic. “I wonder if there’s a magnetic storm here.”

Pidge hums and opens a new tab to examine their location. It’s void of anything. No nearby stars, no planets, no nebulae or gas pockets or stray asteroids. 

“Shouldn’t be,” she replies. “We’re in the middle of nothing.”

They’re quiet for another long minute as she scours her data and maps. Shiro doesn’t know why she’s still looking, when his passing comment clearly hadn’t been about anything notable. There’s obviously nothing here, but she brings her tablet closer to her face and frowns. 

“Hey Shiro,” she says slowly, “didn’t you say your connection to the Black Lion was severed?”

Shiro’s mouth pulls down at the corners. “Yeah, I—”

“Hey, guys?” Keith calls back into the deck. “You might wanna come up here for a minute.”

They all file into the cockpit, just like last time.

“What’s up, Keith?” Shiro asks. 

“I don’t know,” Keith says, “but I feel like we should be looking for something. Help me out.”

“Something like what?” Pidge asks flatly, jostling against Shiro’s shoulder as she leans forward to get a better view out the port.

Keith doesn’t respond, leaning forward in his chair at an angle that’s too acute to be casual. Shiro focuses in on where his hands are clenched around the controls before his attention is drawn back to the spacescape. 

Something tugs at his heart. It’s electromagnetic. Shiro closes his eyes and reaches out. 

He’s not aware of his hand over Keith’s on the ship’s steering, he’s not aware that he’s leaned completely into Keith’s space, until he’s begun to nudge it starboard. 

“Oh,” he says, retracting. “Sorry.”

“No,” Keith says. “You’re right.” 

So Shiro again closes his eyes and replaces his hand, feeling the hard ridge of Keith’s knuckles gripped beneath his palm, and together they tip the nose of the pod over. A little further. And a little further. And a little further. 

“Holy shit,” Lance says. “ _ That’s _ definitely something.”

Shiro’s eyes snap open, and he finds that Lance is not wrong. The shape is hulking, huge. Dark and shadowed against the stars. 

“ _ No _ ,” Keith breathes, wild and disbelieving. 

It’s not because he’s seen something. It’s because he’s  _ felt _ something. And in the next second, Shiro feels it too. 

“Oh my god.”

“That’s—”

“ _ Whoa _ .”

Shiro looks at Keith. Keith tears his eyes away from the view in front of him to look at Shiro. 

“It can’t be,” he says, voice weak and small.

But the light from a nearby star has rounded a planet. It touches first a metallic tail, the hind haunches. It spreads its glow over machinery unlike anything else the universe has ever seen. Over black loins. Over wings. It continues until the massive head is clearly visible. 

“It is,” Shiro says. “It’s the Black Lion.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you’ll notice that the chapter count has gone up again….sorry lmao. 6 is probably the final number but I’m not foolish enough to make any promises
> 
> i took a different approach this writing this chapter and i think it might read a little differently! i hope it's still enjoyable :)

“So we’re in agreement then,” Lance says. “Shiro and Keith are taking the Black Lion.”

_ In agreement _ seems like a stretch. Shiro doesn’t remember agreeing to anything. Definitely not taking the Black Lion with Keith. He doesn’t even know how that idea came up in the first place, or why it suddenly became so popular within the group, when there’s no reason for him to really be anywhere outside of this pod. 

But when he opens his mouth to argue, his vision catches on Keith. Resolute, sure. Keith. 

“Yes,” Keith says. “Lance, stay tight to us. If you can’t I’m handing piloting duty over to Coran.”

Lance squawks as Coran stands straight at attention with a gleam in his eye.

“You can’t do that! You’re not the boss of me!” He huffs out a long breath. “At least not anymore!”

It’s not until Shiro and Keith are donning spacesuits that the reality of the situation begins to set into Shiro’s stomach, leaving it rolling. He glances up from where he’s double checking the seals around his shoulder to watch Keith coiling his braided hair around his neck to keep it from getting caught in the helmet as he pushes it down over his head. 

They’re just standard space suits, civilian instead of combative, and part of Shiro yearns for the old days of his thick Paladin armor’s chest plate sitting firm over his heart. But their armor and their bayards are all housed in some glistening, gleaming Altean war museum that Shiro has refused to set foot in since he brought Curtis to the grand opening event. Keith, that day, had looked devastating in his Blade of Marmora uniform, and he had taken one look at Curtis’s hand wrapped around Shiro’s bicep before disappearing for the remainder of the event. 

Now, similarly, he doesn’t look back as the oxygen drains from the airlock and the hatch opens to the expanse before leaping out into nothing. Shiro, with some small amount of trepidation, follows. It’s been a long time since it’s been him and a Lion versus empty space. Ever since the clone’s memories merged with his own and instilled in him a healthy fear of the vast void of the cosmos, that first step hasn’t always been easy. 

But Keith is as fearless as ever, and Shiro can almost hear the laughter on his breath as he shoots towards the war machine that floats, lifeless, against the backdrop of stars. Shiro can’t blame him. This is a sort of homecoming. 

Or, at least, it’s supposed to be. When you spend months trapped inside a magical robot’s consciousness you begin to think that you know them, but Shiro isn’t prepared for the way her eyes light when Keith, ahead of him, draws near. She tenses suddenly, snapping from a dead hang to a defensive position in a heartbeat, and fixes her vision on Keith. 

Shiro feels the hair on his arm stand on end even before the Lion opens her mouth. 

“Keith,  _ move _ !” he shouts.

But Keith is moving. Keith is always moving. And now he’s thrusting himself to the side with a grunt to evade the laser beamed straight from the Black Lion’s mouth. 

“Is it  _ shooting at you _ ?” shouts Pidge over the comms. 

Her panicked question seems a bit of an overstatement. Watching the aim of the Lion’s mouth, Keith was probably never in any danger of getting hit. The shot hadn’t come near him, missed by a margin wide enough to clearly have not been accidental. But that doesn’t change that it was fired in his and Shiro’s general direction by something with which they had both shared a profound mental bond. 

“She’s just trying to protect herself,” Keith responds through gritted teeth, steering himself back towards the Lion. 

Even as the next laser fires wide, Keith turns a fearful glance over his shoulder in Shiro’s direction. Shiro appreciates the thought spared for him, but he can take care of himself. He’d rather Keith not look away from the immediate threat. 

“Keith, fall back!” he calls. He’s already retreating himself. If the Black Lion doesn’t want them here, then they shouldn’t be here. Plain and simple. Shiro knows firsthand how much destruction just one of the Lions can cause. 

But Keith, of course, isn’t listening. He wouldn’t be Keith if he was, and the knowledge of that is enough to keep Shiro from letting his fear convert itself to anger as Keith darts closer, the Lion’s eyes still trained on him, her mouth open and prepared to fire. 

“Keith, come on!” Hunk says nervously. “This doesn’t seem like a good idea!”

“Why is she shooting?” Lance’s voice comes quieter, distressed in a different way. 

If Keith gets any closer, he’s going to be in the direct line of fire. The next shot misses him by only yards, but he doesn’t so much as flinch as his trajectory brings him into the space that was cleaved by the laser just seconds ago. 

Shiro takes a moment to look back towards their ship. It’s not that far, though it seems to be out of the Lion’s sight. He spins back towards Keith, who’s rocketing towards the Lion armed with nothing but force and intention. 

In a lightning decision, Shiro charges after him. 

“Hey!” shouts Keith, as though the Lion can hear him through the mediumless vacuum. “Stop! It’s  _ us _ !”

But maybe she does hear him. Because there’s a long moment in which her gargantuan head trains its glowing yellow eyes on him, and Shiro feels the same tack-sharp fear that must have coursed through thousands of Galra soldiers in the very seconds before their deaths. But then the eyes dim. 

And the mouth falls open. 

Keith huffs out a sigh as though troubled by a minor inconvenience, and spurs himself towards the Lion with his jetpack. “Let’s go,” he tosses over his shoulder at Shiro. 

Heart still pounding, Shiro follows. 

And yet, even with everything that she just put them through, when he sets his feet down inside the mouth, when he follows Keith through the hatch and the artificial gravity has its way with him, all Shiro can feel wash over him is a profound sense of  _ welcome _ . 

“Do you feel that?” Keith asks him, pulling off his helmet with the instinctive trust that only a Paladin would have for his Lion. There’s a sunrise of a smile on his face that gives Shiro the idea of exactly what  _ that _ he’s referring to. 

“Yeah,” Shiro says, and takes off his helmet too. Air floods his lungs and carries with it a scent that he associates with the interior of the lions: metallic, ozonic, fresh like the snap of cold nights on Daibazaal. 

Despite all that’s happened, watching Keith stride into the cockpit with his head held high and his shoulders thrown back feels like home. 

Shiro lingers in the rear of the flight deck and takes it all in as Kosmo flashes inside and trots up on Keith’s heels. It’s not just that this was once his Lion. It’s that this was once the container for his very soul. Seeing Keith make himself comfortable here drives twin stakes of pain and pride into Shiro’s gut. On one hand, he’s reminded of the tumult that it took to get him there. Shiro’s own death, followed by the profound chaos of the clone. 

He distinctly remembers the desperate, clawing fear of witnessing it all happen from inside here. He was an unwitting audience member to a play whose script he couldn’t alter. Chained to his seat all he could do was watch everyone suffer and know that at some level it was because of him. His only solace, in the beginning, was the nights Keith would sneak about the Black Lion and just sit, or sometimes sleep. Occasionally he would speak aloud, as though he knew Shiro was there. And Shiro would just bask in his presence, because not only did it feel good to be acknowledged by another person in the empty void, but it was  _ his _ person. 

As time went on and Keith was first replaced by the clone and then driven from the group, Shiro for a long time was left completely isolated with his anxiety, like a cage match where the cage was the limitless expanse of the Black Lion’s consciousness. 

But then— 

The bright, vibrant joy of when Keith had taken his rightful seat again had flooded Shiro like blood pounding in his veins. Once the clone had been decommissioned Shiro felt no fear anymore, even as his team struggled, because he knew that Keith was there. And he knew that together, he and Keith could achieve anything. 

And they had. The power that he’d felt in the moment that he and Keith had weaved their focus together, channeled it towards powering the Lion, is a memory that still sets his heart pounding. Their bond had felt blissfully overwhelming in those moments. Shiro had experienced an unconditional faith. And then, suddenly, he’d been waking up in Keith’s arms, the memory of a raw  _ I love you _ echoing in his brain. 

Shiro wishes more than anything he could return to that moment. Keith had his arms around him and was there to catch him when he fell. If he could go back there, he would tell Keith that he loved him too. That he wanted nothing more than to spend the rest of his life with those arms around him, because nothing else in his life would or could ever make him feel more at peace. 

But for now, Shiro leans against the cockpit wall, coolly reviewing his trauma, and waiting for Keith to power on the main engines. He’s been very quiet for a very long moment, and Shiro considers going to check on him, but he’s sure Keith has his own thoughts to work through, just as Shiro does. There was a time when his company in that task would have probably been welcomed, but even with their rekindled friendship Shiro doesn’t know exactly where he stands on this. 

Friends.  _ Friends _ . Shiro is happy with that. He’ll never ask for more, because he knows what it’s like to not have that. Keith’s friendship is more important to him than anything. Than settling down behind a white picket fence with a husband and his two cats. 

“Shiro?” Keith calls back to him. 

“Yeah?” Shiro replies, stepping closer. “Is something wrong?” 

Keith goes still. Here, Shiro can see the cascade of his hair, the quiver of his hands where they hover over the controls. 

“No,” he says. “I just wanted to make sure you’re ready. It’s been a while.”

It has been a while. Shiro hasn’t set foot inside a Lion since he personally dug an unconscious, battered Keith out of this very machine after it plummeted to the hard surface of the desert during the battle for Earth. He hasn’t been on one in flight since well before then. 

“Whenever you’re ready, Keith,” Shiro says. 

Keith swivels in the chair to meet Shiro’s eyes. Their shared look, to Shiro, feels like it could last an eternity, lit only by the speckle of starlight beyond Keith’s profile. But then Keith turns back forward, the edge of a smile playing at the corner of his lips that Shiro can see, and rests his hands fully where they belong. 

Purple floods Shiro’s vision, and something sleeping in his chest sparks to life. 

Once Keith has finished a few exhilarated loops in the Lion, “Now what, team leader?” Lance asks over the comms, his face beaming at the sight of Keith in the pilot seat. Shiro can imagine how good this feels for both of them, because it feels good for him too. 

“Where are the other Lions?” Hunk asks. “Are they around here somewhere? Why can’t we see them?” 

Shiro draws closer to the pilot seat to get a better view on the conversation. He ends up hanging off the back of Keith’s chair, careful not to accidentally brush his fingers against wild hair or press his hip to a shoulder. 

“Do you feel them?” Shiro asks, thinking of the tug in his chest when he was speaking with Pidge. It’s irrefutable now, what that was, even if he had believed that that connection was severed. He wonders if it’s him still clinging to the Lion, or the Lion still clinging to him. 

“Any read on Allura, Lance?” Keith tags on, adjusting some of the dials on his display. 

Lance raises his fingers to his face. “I have a weird feeling. Like maybe they’re both around here somewhere, but I can’t get an exact feel. Like it’s behind a wall or something.”

Pidge, beside him, has tugged out her tablet, and scrolls rapid-fire through the data. “That might actually align with a theory I have.” She sighs and shuts her eyes before placing the datapad aside. “I think we’re near the right location, for now, as long as she and the Lions don’t move again, which is also a possibility. 

“But as far as being on the right plane….”

“Oh no,” Hunk cuts in. “Is she jumping through realities? Didn’t she learn that isn’t a good idea?”

“Yes, I don’t believe Allura would do something like that,” Coran says. 

“I didn’t say she was!” Pidge says. “It could be the Lions’ power, or she could be occupying the space outside of realities. We don’t know yet. We just don’t have the kind of tools that would be able to find the origin of a signature like that.”

She sounds frustrated by this fact, and if Shiro knows her at all she’ll have a prototype of something that can do just that within a week of her return home. But for now, their technology doesn’t extend much beyond what they’ve come armed with. Namely, their preternatural connections with a set of robotic felines.

“Wait,” says Lance. “Why was the Black Lion here, then? All by itself?” 

Keith shrugs, preoccupied with the Lion’s gauges and meters. “I called her.” 

“You  _ what _ ,” Hunk replies. 

“I called her,” Keith says, like he’s saying that he invited her over for coffee. “I could feel her around. So I reached out and told her to come to us.”

“So we should all try to call our Lions then,” Pidge says. 

Shiro nods. “Give it a shot.” 

It takes a minute. Pidge and Hunk exchange a look and a nervous giggle. Lance has to brush himself off and stand up straighter. They all shut their eyes, but Hunk and Lance peek out of the corners of their eyes at the same time to make sure that they’re doing the right thing and end up frowning at each other for a long moment before getting back to it. It’s been a while since they’ve done this, Shiro knows. He isn’t sure how comfortable he himself would feel being asked to throw out his consciousness on command in front of an audience like this anymore either. Something about it does feel silly, until you recall that this was, in fact, their entire reason for being for a long, long time. 

There might be a glow on Lance’s face. Or it could just be visual feedback on the screen, an optical illusion. Either way, once the three of them stop fidgeting uncomfortably, it’s only a moment before they’ve started it up again, shifting their weight with deep creases in their brows. Just from the expressions on their faces, Shiro can tell they haven’t been successful.

Lance opens his eyes first.

“I still don’t think we’re in the right place,” Lance says. “It feels like they’re getting farther away.”

“Yeah,” Hunk says, opening his eyes too. “I’ve got nothing.”

“Alright. Let’s chase them down, then,” Keith says. His mouth splits into a smirk. “Can you keep up?” 

Lance’s troubled expression gives way to a grin. “Pft, you’ll be eating my dust by the time I’m done with you, mullet.”

It’s all talk. There’s no way a flimsy Earth pod could compare to the speed of the Black Lion, especially with Keith at the helm. But the easy banter visibly has them feeling light and young. Like they’re just a handful of kids launched accidentally into space again. 

But in the end, it’s Lance who has to take the lead anyway, since he’s the one who’s got a feel on Allura (“And the Red Lion.  _ And _ the Blue Lion,” he reminds them as he cuts the Black Lion off.) This leaves Keith sitting unenthused, trailing after the small craft at a speed the fraction of what the Lion is capable of. 

All there really is for him to do now, it seems, is keep one eye on the pod and the other hesitantly on Shiro. It takes some time for Shiro to confirm that Keith is, in fact, watching him out of the corner of his eye, but once he does, it’s incredibly obvious. 

“Something wrong?” Shiro asks, still hanging onto the back of Keith’s chair. It almost feels like their journey towards Earth after the fight with Lotor when he stands here. The only thing they’re missing is Krolia and the sense of helplessness that comes with being trillions of light years away from your destination. Shiro has gained an arm since then, as well as a divorce settlement. 

“No,” Keith says, and returns his eyes forward with purpose. “I was just thinking about how you felt the Black Lion.” 

Shiro gives a halfhearted smile. “Keith, it’s your Lion now. You don’t have to worry about—”

“She misses you,” Keith says. 

“Our connection was severed,” Shiro replies quickly. 

Keith swivels in his chair and angles his head so that he’s looking up at Shiro. He watches him for a long moment, expression inscrutable. 

“This is my Lion,” Keith says slowly. “I know her. And I know that it’s also your Lion.”

Shiro frowns. “Not anymore.”

Keith rises from his seat. The displays flicker but don’t go out, even as Keith comes to stand face-to-face with Shiro. He’s always been shorter than Shiro, and the close reminder of it isn’t doing Shiro any favors when he has to look down into those deep space nebula eyes. 

“She misses you,” Keith says again, and steps to the side, leaving a clear path between Shiro and the seat. 

“Hey!” comes Lance’s voice through the comms. “You guys stopped. Everything alright?” 

“We’ll catch up in a minute,” Keith replies, not taking his eyes off Shiro. He reaches back with a hand and clicks the connection off. 

Shiro shivers. “I don’t know if—”

“It’s okay if you don’t want to,” Keith says. “I know you were afraid, after what happened. But I’m right here, Shiro. I’m always right here.”

Shiro swallows. He tears his eyes away from Keith, an impossible task, and looks to the stars, to the craft with the others speeding off ahead of them. There aren’t any answers there that are translatable into any language that Shiro knows, so he looks back to Keith and turns himself inward. 

A slender thread meets him, something tied around his heart. When he gives it a gentle tug, the Lion rumbles back. He breathes deep, and wonders what he’s capable of. 

Keith’s eyes are bright with encouragement, his stance tall with confidence and pride. 

Shiro takes the short steps to the pilot’s seat and, holding his breath, sits at the edge of it. When the Lion doesn’t shut down (or self-destruct) around him, he lets the air flow through his lungs again.

Shiro looks up at Keith. Keith is already returning his gaze, before it was even on him. Eyes soft, gleaming. The sharp angles of his face are dulled in the starlight and the purple glow of the cockpit, and his mouth forms a shape that Shiro adores. 

More than anything, Shiro wants him. Wants to take his face between his palms and guide him down for the careful kiss that Keith deserves. That Shiro, on the other hand, doesn’t deserve. 

Instead, Shiro closes his eyes and faces forward. He’s done this before and he can do this again. Keith’s presence is warm at his shoulder, and the Black Lion’s consciousness, so long painfully absent from the back of his mind, washes into him like tidewater. 

He reaches out and takes the controls in his hands. 

Flying a Lion is unlike anything else Shiro has ever experienced. Flying the Atlas came close, but there’s something indescribably personal about the link between Paladin and Lion that the Atlas never quite held. It feels freer, somehow. Less weighty. Lighter. But energy is coursing through him, taking the form of him. The Lion lights him up from the inside. Spreads through his veins and his nerves. Sparks along his tendons and in the marrow of his bones like static electricity, like fire and water. 

It’s breathtaking and oxygenizing. It’s flight. 

Shiro smiles, grips the controls, and thrusts the Lion forward. 

Keith laughs in joy, and he laughs in joy too, and the Black Lion harmonizes in the back of their minds and Shiro feels happy. At peace. Excited. Thrilled. Energized. Warm. In love. Like he could stand up and shout. Like he could save the universe all over again. Like he gladly would turn over every rock and stone from here to Earth and back to find this feeling again. 

“Holy shit,” he laughs breathlessly. He’s barely even gone anywhere, just pushed the Lion forward, but the spring of energy that’s suddenly welled up inside of him is near-overwhelming. 

“When was the last time you flew the Atlas?” Keith asks, and Shiro has to look up at him to make certain he’s not imagining the smile in his voice. But it’s not just a smile. The man is full-on beaming down at him with the light of a sun and it’s stunning. Blinding. Shiro is forced to look away. 

But the view before him is stunning too. Space. The stars and distant planets. The novas and nebulae. The empty, inky dark. They’re twin sights to see. 

“Uh,” Shiro says when he remembers to speak, remembers how to speak, counting backwards in his mind. “Three or four years ago, I think.”

In Shiro’s peripheral, he can see the smile drop from Keith’s features. 

“Shiro,” Keith says, voice suddenly low with disbelief. “That was when the war ended.” 

Shiro quirks up a half-smile for him, but he knows exactly when it was. He doesn’t have to be told. 

“Yeah,” he says. “You were with me the last time. Remember? We were doing drills and we got complaints. Some planets thought it was a show of force, so we grounded the Atlas.” 

“I didn’t know that was permanent,” Keith says musingly. “Even after the Lions left?” 

Shiro sighs and nudges at their heading, just to give his hands and mind something to do. 

“Well, I retired,” Shiro says. 

“So you couldn’t fly anymore?” Keith asks. “Why would you do that?”

It’s a valid question. Shiro loves flying. Shiro loves space. Shiro loves flying and space and he never thought he would live a life devoid of either of those things. 

“Curtis—,” he goes to answer instinctively, but then catches himself. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“Shiro,” Keith says, and his voice comes out scraping and raw, heavy and strained. “I should’ve—” 

“Nope, stop that,” Shiro interrupts. “I made my own decisions. It’s in the past, like you said. Right now I’m flying the Black Lion with my best friend. That’s all I want to think about.”

Breath leaves Keith audibly; it’s all Shiro can do to keep his attention on the console in front of him and not look at Keith. But in the next moment, Keith’s hand finds Shiro’s shoulder and lands there, a reverse image of how Shiro typically would place his hand against the warmth of Keith’s shoulder whenever he could. The touch steadies him, focuses him. 

“It’s good to have you back,” Keith says after a beat. His voice still sounds like it’s been split open. Like his words are too real and too physical.

But Shiro is happy to hear them. To hear the emotion in Keith’s voice, and know that it’s there for him. 

“It’s good to be back,” he replies, just in the way he’s supposed to.

The comms light flashes on, and instinctively Shiro accepts the call. 

“Hey, what are you guys—whoa, Shiro!” 

Lance’s eyes widen in shock when he sees Shiro in the pilot seat, but the surprise is nearly immediately replaced by a grin. 

“Nice, dude!” he crows. “This is awesome!” He swivels in his chair. “Hey guys! Come check this out. It’s like old times!”

Shiro patiently weathers the shouts of excitement, the praise, and the digs that inevitably follow. It’s all good-natured, he knows, and there’s something very nostalgic about sitting in this chair and listening to cheerful banter all around him. Keith’s hand hasn’t left Shiro’s shoulder, and his entire hindbrain is preoccupied solely by the warmth of it, and it only adds to the simple goodness of the moment. 

This sort of attention never used to embarrass him. In the humblest way, he’s always known when he deserved it. A lot of times in the past he did. He was the youngest pilot to go as far as he did. He piloted a ship to Kerberos. He led the group of people who ultimately won the war against the Galra Empire. But now he feels a little bit flustered under the gazes and the clear joy of his former teammates. 

There’s only one thing to do with that, he knows. He has to make it so that he deserves it again. 

* * *

Shiro and Keith switch off piloting for the rest of the quintant. The Black Lion doesn’t seem to prefer one of them to the other, responding just as efficiently no matter who sits in the seat, not even flickering as they switch. Even when he stands just to the side of Keith in the chair he can still feel the Lion’s buzz in the back of his mind, vivacious and alive and energizing in a way that he’s been estranged from for far too long.

In between, they talk. Keith has never been the gregarious type, but Shiro has always had a private appreciation for the way he opens like a morning glory to those who he thinks deserves it. He slips into this sort of comfortable responsiveness with a resilience that Shiro admires. Keith has every single reason that exists to not want to bare himself to Shiro anymore, but each moment passes like a needle pulling two torn edges of cloth back together. They don’t talk about anything important, or at least not to the current situation. But Shiro loses himself in the cadence of Keith’s quiet, understated reports of the Blade of Marmora’s strides in rehoming refugees, in spreading aid to diasporic communities, in delivering peace to those who had never known it. 

In turn, Shiro talks a little bit about his life on Earth. About his administrative desk job at the Garrison. About the decline of his marriage, about the little things he did that drove Curtis to the brink of insanity and back. About how they grounded the Atlas, about how Shiro adjusted to life confined to the outer crust of the planet. 

Every time he stops talking, Keith gives him a look. Shiro doesn’t need to hear his voice to know it means,  _ You survived everything that you did for  _ this _? _

More and more, second by second, Shiro is inclined to agree with him. 

They lose time when they stop again to eat, but Lance doesn’t seem concerned. In fact, he’s far more invested in bickering with Keith over a stolen cyan-colored French fry. 

When Lance calls them later that evening to let them know that everyone is turning in for the night, Shiro opens his mouth to tell him that they’ll be right over to join them. 

“We’ll sleep then too,” Keith says before he gets the chance. “We’ve got the bunks on here.”

_ We’re friends _ , Shiro has to remind himself as he tries to keep himself from watching Keith strip out of his flight suit, his back turned to Shiro as he does. But Shiro will never have the willpower needed to stop himself from counting the knobs of Keith’s spine. The muscles of his back are pronounced where pale, scarred skin slides over them. There’s a dark shape Shiro’s never seen before on Keith’s shoulder blade, and when he lets down his hair it peeks through between the strands. Shiro can’t help but draw closer to see. 

“Did you get a tattoo?” he asks, feeling lightheaded. 

Keith starts, and reaches up across his body as if to cover it with his opposite hand. “Oh, uh. Yeah.” His fingers close over the ink. “I forget it’s there sometimes.”

“Can I see?” Shiro asks, his own hand reaching out to brush Keith’s hair and fingers out of the way. He stops just before he makes contact, and his fingers hover. 

Keith freezes, and Shiro can tell just by the set of his shoulders that he doesn’t know how to respond. Shiro wishes he could take the question back, even though more than anything he wants to know every inch of Keith’s body. But just as he’s about to backtrack and apologize, Keith lets his hand fall out of the way and tilts his head to swing the waves of his hair away from it. 

It’s not big. It’s plain black ink in impossibly thin lines against Keith’s moon-pale skin. It’s stylized and simplified, a sharp geometry to its edges, but it’s obvious what the shape of it is. The Black Lion, wings outstretched, roars as it flies. And just underneath, in a simple, narrow font, three words are printed:

_ PATIENCE YIELDS FOCUS _

Shiro swallows against the lump in his throat. It takes him a long moment to find his voice. He’s grateful, in this moment, that he can’t see Keith’s face, and that Keith can’t see his. 

“When did you get this?” he asks. 

Keith’s breath is audible, the in and out, pull and push of his lungs. 

“Two years ago,” he says, his voice small. 

Shiro has to turn away from him. 

He can’t think of any words to make this less agonizing for either of them, but he tries anyway.

“It’s nice, Keith,” he says, distant and distracted. 

The shared knowledge of their situation stretches out between them, and they’re silent as they continue to get ready for bed. But when Keith is just about to climb into his cot, dressed in simple sleep clothes, he pauses and makes deliberate eye contact. 

“Goodnight, Shiro,” he says.

There’s barely light enough in the hold to see by, but Keith sleeping curled against Kosmo is the last thing Shiro sees before he falls asleep. 

When Shiro wakes up naturally, the shape of Keith’s tattoo still lingers hauntingly behind his eyelids, but the new day is charitably willing to give him a fresh start. He rolls out of bed and bumbles around the Black Lion for a few moments, changing into his day clothes, brushing his teeth. Kosmo growls in his dreams and Keith lies silent beside him. 

They both know that Shiro knows that Keith is awake. Shiro gets down on the ground to do some push-ups, because he’s absolutely nothing if not disciplined. It’s the same routine he’s been doing since before he left for Kerberos, the same one that Curtis complained was too much noise too early in the morning every single day of their honeymoon on the beach planet of Klarisis. 

Keith slings his arm over Kosmo and pillows his head on his shoulder as he watches. Shiro makes a point of not looking at him, not acknowledging him, because he knows that if he does he’ll drop himself on his face. 

Eventually, Keith rises and pads silent and barefoot through the hold. He goes about tying his hair back and dressing as Kosmo rolls over to fill his vacant spot on the bed. Finished with his workout, Shiro rises to greet him, standing between him and the cockpit as Keith moves towards it. 

Keith stops just before colliding with Shiro’s chest. He tilts his chin up, his head to the side, and gives Shiro a look that he would describe as inscrutable if he hadn’t spent years learning the lines of Keith’s every mood. 

“Morning,” Keith says, voice low. 

“Good morning,” Shiro says. 

“You’re up early again,” Keith replies.

“So are you.”

They go to the cockpit side-by-side, and as they reach the chair, they both stop. It should be awkward as they both instinctively wait for the other to step forward, but it’s not. They both genuinely want it to belong to the other as much as they do to themselves. If there’s anything in life that Shiro is certain of, it’s that. 

“I’ll rock-paper-scissors you,” Shiro says, letting the corner of his mouth uptick into a grin. “Loser flies.”

Keith smirks. It tingles in Shiro’s belly and he readies himself for Keith’s competitive streak, calling on his own to match it, until the expression slides off Keith’s face and his eyes grow distant. Shiro’s about to ask what’s wrong when he opens his mouth on his own. 

“I had an idea,” Keith says. His voice is cautious, like those words themselves are something he’s going to regret. He turns a different color as he says them, cheeks dark in the dim purple lighting of the cabin. 

“Yeah?” Shiro prods. 

Keith won’t meet his eyes, and it’s a funny thing from a man who charges everything like he’s got horns sprouting from his head and a thickness of skull to match. 

“Just something I used to think about,” Keith says, evidently diverting attention and edging the concept away from his own chest. 

“Lay it on me,” Shiro says, fully embracing the sense of awkwardness that’s now radiating off Keith like heat off asphalt. 

Keith finally looks up, and eyes him for an extended, silent moment. 

“Sit down,” Keith says, and so Shiro does, obedient and unhesitating. 

Slowly, Keith’s footsteps round the chair from behind him. He gives Shiro one last look, almost expectant, wary, checking Shiro’s face for something completely unknown to Shiro. But then he half-pivots, and Shiro realizes what he’s about to do the split second before he does it. As it occurs to him, time seems to slow to a dead stop. 

He must be dreaming. He must be hallucinating, or something. Because that’s Keith in front of him, Keith with the deep space eyes and the star-plasma voice and the will and dedication and devotion of a hundred thousand German shepherds, possessor of a strong, lithe body, legs for days, and a smile that could—and does—stop Shiro’s heart. It’s that Keith who is now purposefully  _ not _ looking at him, chin lifted and pointed forward, the swing of his hair dipping below the line of Shiro’s sight. He’s so warm that Shiro can feel him through his clothes, he’s organic, he’s alive, he’s touching Shiro with more and more of himself as the seconds stretch themselves into miniature infinities in which Shiro has no idea where to put his hands. 

And then, Keith is there. Thighs on thighs. His butt against Shiro’s legs. Seated in Shiro’s lap. 

“Am I too heavy?” Keith asks, voice barely a murmur. 

Shiro is breathless, and therefore speechless. His heart has stopped beating in his chest and his limbs have stopped receiving signals from his nervous system and all that his entire world encompasses is  _ Keith. Keith in his lap. _

“Shiro?” Keith says, shifting forward like he’s trying to get the leverage to lift himself off. “I—” 

“No!” Shiro says quickly, and unthinking, darts a hand forward to pull Keith’s hip back towards himself. “No, you’re not too heavy. Not at all.”

Shiro does think, when he can start thinking again, that if they sat here like this for a prolonged period of time his legs might fall asleep. But that thought just leads to the idea of Keith sitting on Shiro’s lap for a prolonged period of time and that’s dangerous. That’s a thought he wants to make into a reality every day for the rest of his life, and though he has no idea what this is about, he’s smart enough not to jump to any conclusions about it. 

“Oh,” says Keith, jerkily. “Good. Can you reach the controls?” 

Shiro leans forward to grab them, which he knows instantly was a mistake. Now he’s close up against Keith, close to his clothes and his hair, and he can smell the scent of him, comfortable and earthy. He wraps his hands around the controls to ground himself, to give his mind something to focus on besides  _ Keith Keith Keith. _

Keith doesn’t make it easy. He leans forward and puts his hands over Shiro’s. First the right, his finger thin and delicate beside the chunk of metal that forms Shiro’s prosthetic, then the left, his calluses sliding over Shiro’s skin until he fits his grip to Shiro’s knuckles. 

Something in Shiro’s chest leaps. 

“Keith,” he says, laughing, suddenly feeling like he’s made of air. “I can’t really see.”

The sound of the laughter in his voice breaks the tension from Keith’s shoulders. He resettles himself, and the fit of him against Shiro is so perfect and warm that Shiro can’t help but feel this was something intended by the cosmos. 

“Are you sure?” he asks, glancing over his shoulder at Shiro. “See through the Lion’s eyes.” 

It’s all cheek, and Shiro laughs again. He leans even further forward to try to look around Keith, and finds his front pressed up against Keith’s back. They both tense at the contact, but Shiro makes himself relax, and feels Keith relax against him in turn. 

“What’s wrong with  _ my _ eyes?” he asks. 

In fact, Keith is now leaning into him. Their torsos press together, and Shiro feels dizzy. 

“Nothing,” Keith says, swiveled to look down at Shiro, a smile on his face. “You have nice eyes.” 

And oh no.  _ Oh no _ . That’s Shiro’s heart battering against the inside of his ribcage, and it thinks, it  _ thinks _ , that Keith might be trying to...

Maybe...

Flirt with him.

“ _ Good mooooooorning _ ,” Lance’s voice suddenly singsongs through the cockpit. 

Keith flinches right out of Shiro’s hold and onto his feet, with instincts only a trained Marmora operative could hone. Shiro fights the urge to leap up himself, knowing that will only make him look suspicious. Feeling suddenly bereft, Shiro glances up at the screen of the incoming call, praying that Lance didn’t just see where Keith was sitting. 

From the smirk and the raised eyebrows, Lance absolutely did. But he shows a truly impressive leap in maturity when, instead of commenting on it, he just asks, “How did everyone sleep?”

“Fine,” Keith says, way too fast and jerky to be anything casual. It’s cute, like the dusting of pink high on his cheeks. Shiro wonders if he’ll ever stop feeling like a kid with a crush around Keith, if he’ll ever be able to stop gazing at Keith like this, like he’s the first star visible in the night sky. In the aftermath of Keith’s warmth across his thighs, part of him hopes that he doesn’t. His heart is still going approximately a million beats per minute, and his hands tingle where Keith’s had been pressed against them. 

He mentally curses Lance for interrupting, though he’s aware that the situation only came into being because of Lance’s actions against his own council. Hope and gratitude leap in his chest like a pair of acrobats. 

When Shiro finally looks back at Lance, away from Keith, Lance’s eyebrows are raised. Shiro can’t bring himself to feel annoyed, even though it’s pretty clear what Lance is trying to get at through expression alone. 

“Anyway,” Lance says after the extended silence. “We think we’re gonna start moving again. You guys ready?”

“Lead the way, Lance,” Shiro says, placing his hands on the controls again. He’s not sure if he’s supposed to give Keith the opportunity to sit back down, but he’s definitely not going to do it in front of Lance. 

Keith sidesteps anyway, removing himself from the area immediately around the pilot’s chair, and Shiro is struck with the thought that maybe Keith hadn’t actually been genuine about wanting to see if they could pilot together. 

But Shiro doesn’t want to go ahead and make any assumptions about ulterior motives quite yet. He’s still reeling, trying to make sense of any of this. 

Keith said they’re friends. Keith said he  _ used to _ love him. Keith wasn’t even talking to Shiro in full sentences until a handful of days ago. 

It’s nothing worth getting his heart set on. 

Even once Lance’s video window closes, Keith hovers around the back of Shiro’s chair and Shiro takes that as his cue to pilot on his own. He tracks Lance’s pod with his eyes. Later, in bits and pieces of scientific jargon that Shiro only half understands, Pidge tells him about how even with their breaks, the likelihood of running into one of the Lions today is high, given that the physical locations of the planes don’t perfectly map to each other. 

It doesn’t take a very long time for her prediction to come true. 

Keith is piloting when Lance calls them again, something hard and flinty in his eyes, locked in the same way that they usually are when he’s staring through the scope of a gun. 

“I think I feel them,” he says, voice determined. 

“Who’s ‘them’?” Shiro asks. 

“The Red Lion. The Blue Lion.” Lance’s mouth curls into a hardened smile. “Allura.”

“ _ Pull _ ,” Keith urges.

Shiro’s heart pounds. There’s an energy buzzing in him again, bigger than just the Black Lion. Something that tethers him to the universe as a whole. Something that lives like live wires connecting him to the other Paladins, to all reality, to the quintessence that powers everything. As though the existence, the  _ proximity _ , of the other Lions makes him whole. 

Hunk and Pidge and Coran keep up a low murmur of conversation in the background of the feed, but in the front of the craft, Lance’s eyes are closed. Not squeezed shut with overexertion, but at peace. He’s calling through all spacetime, and the curve of his mouth tells that he’s confident about what lies at the other end. 

And then Keith laughs, loud, clear, and buoyant. 

“Hey, Lance!” he calls. “Look who it is.”

In front of them, the Red Lion’s eyes flash, alive and dangerous. 

Lance’s eyes snap open, and he doesn’t even pause before shooting out of his chair. But before he can even stumble out of the cockpit, the Red Lion turns tail and fires all jets. 

“Whoa!” Pidge cries. “Where’s it going?”

“After her!” Coran shouts. 

“Keith, you’re the only one who could possibly catch Red,” Shiro says. “Go get her.”

He’s granted the sideways view of the smirk that breaks up Keith’s face, the determined set of his eyebrows like this is a fun game. 

“I’ll bring her back your way, Lance,” he says, and Shiro barely has the warning of Keith’s fingers flexing on the Black Lion’s controls before the Black Lion goes shooting off. He has to grab onto the back of the chair to steady himself, but the thrilling shock of adrenaline that comes from the sudden acceleration brings a smile to his face. 

He’s not the only one. Keith’s not even bothering to hide his wild grin as he pushes the Black Lion faster, and faster, and  _ faster _ , throttle shoved full, encouraged further by the push of Keith’s mind. Even Lance, now left in the dust of the two Lions streaking through space, is watching them with a combination of nerves, awe, and joy. 

In a flat race, there’s no way that the Black Lion could ever hope to cut off the Red Lion. The Red Lion was built purely for speed and agility, outpacing the Black Lion both along a straight line and around curves. But this isn’t a flat race. In fact, Shiro guesses this isn’t a race at all. The Red Lion hurries forward in jolts and spurts, almost letting Keith catch it every time before jetting forward again. 

The Red Lion’s playing with them, Shiro knows, but Keith can play too. Every part of him was born for the freedom of flight, and he doesn’t ever let anything get the better of him. With every turn at first it looks like the Red Lion is leading them away on a wild goose chase, Keith is there, immediately behind, darting and speeding and soaring and cutting off at the last second. Shiro is impressed by his flying, of course, but never more so than when Keith tightens his grip and swings around the last corner just as the Red Lion does too, effectively cutting it off and leading straight back in the direction of the craft that Lance is piloting after them. 

“It’s all you, Lance!” Keith says. “I’m bringing her back. Reach out to her.”

Together, the Red and Black Lions charge down the small craft across the broad stretch of space. For a long, heart-pounding moment, Shiro waits for the Red Lion to veer back out away from the both of them. There’s no reason for it to be caught between the two like a lightspeed game of monkey in the middle, not when there’s nothing around them but the vacuum.

But it continues forward, racing towards the small craft without change, flying, flying, until it comes to a sudden, violent halt, right before the craft. There it settles and hangs, motionless, staring directly into the cockpit. 

A collective sigh of relief goes through both ends of the comms link, and then a moment of silence. Then there’s a  _ whoop _ from the comms and shouts and high-fives and static, and then they’ve got a video feed on Lance launching himself from the pod’s hatch into the bright expanse of space. He has no fear as his body goes weightless, as he floats through the void, and both Keith and Shiro watch on as he soars across the backdrop of stars, and then starfishes, ungracefully, like a bug on a windshield, against the Red Lion’s snout.

“You’re back,” he laughs under his voice, though it’s loud enough to carry through the comms. He raises a hand and knocks twice against her snout. “Let me in.”

“She’s not going to let you in that easy,” Keith snorts, nothing but good nature in his tone. Shiro knows that the Red Lion is still held close to his heart, even if Keith never pilots her anymore. That connection must thrive in the back of his mind, alive and humming despite the changes on the team. 

“Take good care of her,” Keith warns. 

It only takes about ten more minutes of Lance clinging to the snout of the Lion for her to open up for him. Shiro praises Keith for his quick thinking and quicker flying as they wait, and it makes his breath catch in his throat to watch the way Keith’s smile grows small, quiet, bright, as though flustered and warmed by Shiro’s words. Shiro wants to reach out and run his thumb along the bottom line of it, feel the warmth of Keith’s pride in himself. 

Every moment that passes in shared company, Shiro fears that he might. It’s a familiar fear as it shifts from the anxiety that he might be rejected to fear of the opposite. Shiro knows now as he knew years ago that he doesn’t deserve it. He doesn’t deserve Keith’s time or his life or his feelings. And the best way to protect Keith is to not make himself a threat at all. 

But Shiro still aches with the fullness in his chest. With every second between them that feels like it could be something more than two people who the universe tries to pull apart at every turn. 

“I’m good!” Lance calls once he’s settled. He’s backlit in a red glow, grinning from ear to ear with his hands on the Red Lion’s controls. Shiro can’t help but laugh at the sight of him. Somehow, it makes him proud. 

“Two Lions down, three to go,” Keith replies. “Let’s get to it.”

“The chase took us pretty far off the path we were on,” Pidge says from the craft. Coran has taken the pilot’s seat and she’s in the navigator’s, and Shiro can almost feel how much she must be itching to get her hands back on the Green Lion. “We’re going to have to head back to where we were.”

“Then let’s go!” shouts Lance, and he shoots past them, past the Black Lion and where the others watch from the small Earth craft, only to come bounding back, laughing, when he realizes how fast he’s going, how he’s left them in his dust. 

“Lead the way, Lance,” says Keith, and Shiro doesn’t have to look at him to hear the smile in his voice, but he does look at him anyway, because he likes to. Because even if they’re friends something bright and warm ignites inside Shiro at the sight of him. Something that he wants to rekindle, shelter, nurture, because he knows it will do the same for him. 

Like he knows Shiro is thinking about him, as he kicks the Lion into motion, Keith looks up at him, still smiling. Shiro’s stomach swoops, and not from the movement of the robot. This is just what one man can do to him. 

It’s only the beginning of a long day, and Shiro knows it. But somehow right now, he’s looking forward to what’s to come. 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> trigger warning for a pretty involved description of a panic attack in this chapter
> 
> also i forgot to mention this last chapter but a huge shoutout to [ritzypotato](https://twitter.com/ritzypotato) for brainstorming ideas for keith’s tattoo with me. i’m p sure they were the one who thought of him having patience yields focus tattooed on him 
> 
> also also gonna put this here. my truly incredible friend [moth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flyingisland/pseuds/flyingisland) made a lovely playlist that i feel perfectly fits the vibe of this fic [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/kp8wvpigfx8rgabca96edj2dz/playlist/1XX4air7r8L7nKl6XQ2tRi?si=vrJ3NWIqR4ydWcKEbnPvSg)  
> i also made one, though mine's more lyric-focused. it's [here!](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/412TcJ5o3jomJP5mPyIkdI)

It is, at this point, surprisingly easy to find the Green Lion. 

Lance, somehow, is more spirited than ever. Where Keith keeps pace with Coran in the pod, Lance complains about their slow pace, shoots forward until he’s a red speck in the distance, comes back, complains again, talks about how Allura must be waiting for them. Keith vacillates between quietly laughing at his incessant chatter and muting it in order to, as he says, focus on flying, but generally, it turns into conversing freely with Shiro more than it doesn’t.

“It’s going to be the Green Lion next,” Keith says in full confidence, and Shiro isn’t entirely sure how they know this but he agrees. It’s something in how the Lions are interconnected. Along the line of his tether to Black, he can feel Keith here beside him the strongest, and then distantly Lance and the Red Lion, darting back and forth through a nearby nebula. And if he keeps pulling and pulling and pulling, the Green Lion’s bright energy is there. Weak, muted like sound underwater, but there. In their comms viewscreen, Pidge isn’t even bothering to sit in her chair anymore on the pod, leaning halfway forward, forearms resting on the ship’s console.

“Is it weirdly convenient that they’re turning up one at a time like this?” Hunk asks. 

“I don’t think that’s an accident,” Keith replies, and again, Shiro is preternaturally in agreement. “And I think it has to do with why the Black Lion shot at us and why Red ran away.” 

Red returns to their side, matching their speed as Lance rejoins the conversation. 

“Oh yeah,” he says. “I thought that was obvious. They’re protecting Allura.”

“That…,” Pidge says slowly, a puzzled frown growing on her face, “actually makes sense.”

“Of course it does! Why do you sound surprised?” Lance crosses his arms. “It’s like a video game. You’ve gotta collect all the other stuff before you can save the princess.” 

“This isn’t a video game, Lance,” Keith says, but he’s still smiling. 

They’ve all been smiling a lot today. Even Shiro. Especially Shiro. And it’s not even fabricated. He can’t remember the last time he smiled like this.

“Anyway, this means we’ve got to be prepared for anything with the Green Lion,” Shiro says. “Pidge, are you ready?” 

“I’ve  _ been _ ready,” she replies. 

And from there, it’s nothing more than a little bit of flight before Pidge is shouting that she’s got it. She’s getting ready to go, prepared for anything, as she already claimed. She’s dressed in a full spacesuit. She’s itching to get her hands back on the controls of an ancient war vessel with a mind of its own. 

And maybe, in some of the multitudes of realities that exist in creation, there were Pidges who were ready. There were situations in which bringing the Green Lion to heel was as easy as finding it in the first place. Slav could probably tell the percentages of this reality being one of those, but Shiro doesn’t need to be a supergenius to tell when the probability of something not going absolutely to shit crashes down to zero. 

The warning they get is felt as a buzzing in the back of Shiro’s mind, like the aura of a migraine. It lasts only long enough for Shiro to acknowledge it, realize it’s not natural, before it suddenly blooms open, spilling like ink and overtaking his entire consciousness. Everything goes dark. And then darker. And then even darker still. 

Until Shiro blinks, and a familiar landscape, or lack thereof, spreads before his eyes. A star-speckled vastness curves high and neverending above his head. A dark, empty horizon, green-tinged, stretches into the distance. He knows no matter how far he runs in any direction, none of this will change. None of this will ever change. He’s stuck in the center of a never changing loop. It’s like being in the dark in a room just large enough to stand in while simultaneously being surrounded by a boundless nothingness. Solitary confinement in the void. He’s lost in infinity. 

The Green Lion has him. He’s inside the Green Lion’s consciousness. 

The first thing Shiro does is take a deep, full breath. Hyperventilation, though his immediate instinct, won’t help him right now. He focuses on counting to four in his head, filling his lungs to maximum capacity, and then lets it out.  _ One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four _ . The lines of panic that sunk their hooks into his skin still tug at him, but less insistently when he distracts himself and focuses on concrete things he needs to do in the moment. 

He thinks about calling out for the others, but he knows the way his voice travels here, both echoey and empty, lost into the distant nothingness, will haunt him if he doesn’t get a response. He thinks about contacting the Green Lion, but his connection to her is contingent upon his connections to Pidge and the Black Lion, and both feel distant, dulled, muted. 

He’s not stuck here. He can’t be. He’ll get out soon. This is a test, or a defensive maneuver. Something temporary. Not permanent. He just needs to figure out how. 

_ Keith _ , somehow, is his next thought. The idea that Keith will find him is pervasive, a given, and expands in his mind until there isn’t much else to think about. But he knows that he has to try. He has to at least give a push to reach out. Dig himself out of here. 

Shiro sits against the ground, folding his legs under him. He shuts his eyes, and tries to ignore the sense of dread that’s filling him from the bottom up like water poured into a bucket. Instead, he reaches out with his mind and makes an attempt to connect. First, with the Green Lion, prodding and questioning, but she’s closed off and unresponsive. He guesses that she won’t be of much help to him until he can figure out why she’s holding him here. 

Next, Pidge seems like the logical option. As the pilot of the Green Lion, if anyone can help fish Shiro out of here it’s her. But when Shiro reaches over his connection to the Black Lion to make contact with her, it’s through the Green Lion. He can vaguely feel Pidge’s determination in the distance, but he gets the feeling that it’s a one-way connection. 

But he can grasp the Black Lion here. And while that’s not the comfort it would have once been, given his paralyzing fear of being trapped in her consciousness again, he knows that she will protect him, keep him safe, if he gives himself over to her. 

Here, faintly, he can feel something else pressing up against him. It shouldn’t be a surprise, and it isn’t. He does share the Black Lion, after all. 

_ Keith _ , he thinks again.

It’s like laying his hand flat to a pane of frosted glass. He can’t see what’s beyond it except for blurred shapes and colors, but when a hand presses to his from the opposite side, he can tell. 

“Keith,” he says out loud. “Keith!”

“ _ Shiro _ .”

The voice is muffled and faint, but definite. Audible. Shiro grasps their connection in both hands and  _ tugs _ . It gives a little, and the expanse of nothingness around him, though visually unchanged, somehow feels less engulfing. 

With a deep breath, Shiro tries again, this time sinking his efforts not only into Keith, but into Lance, into Pidge, into a faraway whisper of the Yellow Lion, and something even beyond that. He concentrates, and pulls with all his might. 

There’s the sound of glass shattering, impossibly loud in his ears, vibrating to his core. 

Suddenly he’s back in his body. Suddenly the ground is too solid beneath his feet, the world is too bright around him, the caress of air and feel of fabric on his skin is too overwhelming. Suddenly he can’t handle that he was in a Lion’s consciousness again. Suddenly all the thoughts he’s been fighting off come rushing back in. 

The cockpit of the Black Lion blurs, and then tilts before his eyes. The floor rushes up to meet him. His legs are stuck in tar. His arms are sand. No matter how hard he breathes there’s no air. So he breathes more and more, harder and harder, but there’s nothing in his lungs, they’re empty, he’s empty, he can’t breathe, he’s dying, he’s dying, he’s dying, he’s— 

“Shiro.”

The voice is steady and cool where nothing else is. Shiro latches onto it. 

“Shiro,  _ breathe _ . Breathe with me.” 

Shiro feels himself open his mouth, but it’s like no air enters. He feels like a beached fish, uselessly fluttering its gills. Like an overturned beetle, feebly, futilely waving its six, spindly limbs in the air. 

“Shiro, I’m here,” the voice says. “You’re okay. Breathe. In, two, three, four. Out, two, three, four. Good. Let’s do it again.”

Shiro doesn’t know if he’s breathing along, but he buries himself in the numbers. Concrete and certain. They’re said by Keith, and if Keith is here, then Shiro is safe. Shiro breathes.

“I’m going to touch you,” Keith says. “Is that okay? Nod if that’s okay.”

Shiro isn’t aware of doing it, but his head goes up and down, and then there’s pressure on him, steadying, grounding, warm. It’s slow at first, a fleeting touch on his shoulder, a pass over his hair. But then it envelops him, cocoons him. Shiro sinks into it. 

There’s sound in the background, voices chattering, and Shiro is too tired to parse them into people he can recognize, sentences that make sense. He focuses on his breathing and the heat around him, a warm, soft scent that’s filling his nasal cavity and making him calm. But the sounds begin to filter into his head anyway. 

“—think we were...her way of slowing us down.”

“He had a panic attack. I’ve got—”

“Probably…the Black Lion...okay?”

“Yeah,” says Keith, and this time the world is coming into focus enough for Shiro to realize it’s him, speaking low and close near his ear. “I think he just needs a minute.”

“Alright, I’ll go grab Green.” 

Shiro tries to pick his head up, but a gentle pressure guides him back down. He’s becoming vaguely aware of his surroundings: that his forehead is lodged against the crook of Keith’s neck and shoulder, that his chest hurts with how hard his heart has been pounding, that there’s a steady, dragging motion caressing up and down the length of his arm, that Keith’s chest is rising and falling with exaggerated, comforting slowness beside his body. Each piece slowly fits itself into the puzzle of his reality, and soon he can start to regain his sense of self. 

Keith’s face, if Shiro is cognizant enough to understand what’s going on around him, is pressed against his hair. Keith’s lips are soft, warm, against his forehead. 

“What’s Shiro’s status, Keith?” Pidge asks, voice distant, watery. “If we go now we can get the Yellow Lion.” 

Shiro’s mind swims and he tries to sit up, but Keith’s hold on him tightens. The comforting pressure against his forehead lifts, just momentarily. 

“Go on without us,” Keith says, his voice grounding in Shiro’s ear. “We’ll catch up.”

“You sure?” Lance asks. 

“ _ Go _ ,” Keith replies.

The comms drop off with some static, and Keith lowers his face to Shiro’s head again. Dazed, Shiro tilts his head back to look up at Keith, who removes himself just a few inches to meet his eyes. 

“Are you okay?” Keith asks, voice downy. 

Under any other circumstances, with any other person, Shiro might begin to feel embarrassed here. But that doesn’t seem to be a problem right now. 

Shiro looks up at Keith in wonderment, in awe. “You saved me again.”

He’s not smiling as he searches Shiro’s face for any further signs of distress, but there’s something infinitely soft there. Intensely serious in his devotion, he doesn’t speak until he’s sure that Shiro is breathing normally again. “I meant what I said. As many times as it takes.”

Again, Shiro finds himself struggling for breath, but the reason is so wholly different this time it overwhelms and consumes him. It’s like a tidal wave washing him out to sea, the rip current pulling him under, and he’s never been more thrilled to drown. The feelings radiating off Keith like heat from a sun are so thick they pour down Shiro’s throat and choke him, fill his lungs, clog his heart. And Keith is so ethereal above him, every rise of his face highlighted by the sharp purple of the Black Lion, every dip treated in soft shadow, every inch of him consummately perfect, flawless, in his own wild-haired, scarred, over-bold way. 

_ I love you,  _ thinks Shiro fiercely, with every cell in his body, with every neuron in his brain, so hard that it fills all the space in his body normally filled with blood and marrow.  _ I love you and if you ever gave me the chance to hold you again I would never let you go.  _

Suddenly Keith’s eyes go glassy. 

Heartbreak strikes through Shiro like he’s been impaled through the chest, but it isn’t until the pad of Keith’s thumb rises to swipe at the space under Shiro’s eyes that he realizes that  _ he’s  _ the one who’s crying. 

“Shiro,” Keith says, and his voice is raw and gravely over the syllables, throat tight around the word like he too could break down at any moment. He pours so much of himself into that one word that Shiro is still stuck on it even as Keith bows his head and presses his forehead against Shiro’s, his eyes closed. 

Their breaths mingle. They’re close enough that Keith is barely a blur in front of him, but Shiro can’t close his eyes. He can hardly move at all, gripped so intensely by the need to tilt his head, to close in, to lay his lips against Keith’s and feel what the two of them might become if they were connected together again. But somehow this moment in itself is infinitely intimate. Somehow this feels closer than if their bodies were touching any more than they are right now. 

They stay there until Shiro’s eyes close too. Until he feels like his pulse and Keith’s are one and the same. Until they’re breathing at the same tempo. Until they’ve reached complete equilibrium with each other. 

Something has shifted, and when Keith finally pulls backwards, when Shiro blinks his eyes open to look at the source of his happiness, the change is wordlessly, motionlessly acknowledged with a long, gentle gaze. 

Keith’s hand is clasped around Shiro’s, between their chests. It’s the one he uses to shift Shiro to a more comfortable position as he starts to rise.

“Come on,” he says, helping Shiro to his unsteady feet. He bears Shiro’s weight easily when Shiro’s knees feel like nothing more than the thin stalks of dandelions, waiting to be torn and wished upon. “Sit down over here.” 

He lowers Shiro into the pilot’s chair with a tenderness like he’s pruning an orchid, his fingers lingering against Shiro’s body for several heartbeats more than necessary. 

“How do you feel?” he asks. 

“I’m fine,” Shiro says, but he’s not stupid enough to think that Keith is going to believe something like that so readily. 

He doesn’t. He gives Shiro a look and crosses his arms over his chest. 

“Does anything hurt?” he asks in a voice contrarily soft to his body language. 

_ My chest, _ Shiro thinks, but he knows that isn’t what Keith means. He looks away and down, suddenly feeling uncertain of himself and all his actions and every decision that led him to this moment. 

“Shiro,” says Keith, and his fingers are suddenly light against Shiro’s jaw where they’ve landed, stroking tenderly. 

It’s too much. It’s all too much and Shiro can’t do this. He can’t be this person that Keith seems to have always thought he was. He’s gotten too old. Given up too many things. Made too many mistakes. Keith’s touch is impossibly faint, but it’s still enough to break him. Shiro snags Keith by the wrist.

“Keith,” he says quietly. “I’ve always been bad at these kinds of things. You know that.” 

“Hey.” 

Keith’s tone is unforgiving, but his eyes are nothing but soft as he puts his palms against Shiro’s cheeks and guides his face upwards. 

“You don’t have to worry about that anymore,” he says. “I’ve got you.” 

“But—”

“No buts.” Keith runs the pads of his thumbs over Shiro’s cheekbones, and Shiro has never felt any touch so godly in his life. “You never gave up on me. I’m not giving up on you.” 

Shiro feels his face crumple. 

“But I did give up on you.”

Keith takes the time to smooth out all of the creases that Shiro feels forming on his face. His thumb pushes against his forehead until Shiro’s brow relents under it. He pulls at the sides of Shiro’s mouth until it gives up its frown. 

“Then why are you here?” 

A ripple of something powerful passes down Shiro’s spine, and he closes his eyes. Keith isn’t going to let Shiro win this one. Not now, and not ever. Somehow right now under Keith’s hands, he feels more supported than he has in a long time. It’s not that Curtis wasn’t supportive. But there had been conditions to the love that they shared. It wasn’t endless or all-defining. It didn’t feel like a foundation to build a house of emotion on. There came the day when Shiro took a step off the edge and Curtis wasn’t there to catch him. 

But Keith. Keith has always been there to catch him. No matter what. No matter Shiro’s mistakes. His flaws, his poor judgments. His regrets and bad choices. Shiro knows that no matter how many times he flings himself off that precipice, Keith will be there to grab onto his hand. No amount of guilt and self-loathing will ever change that. 

“Keith,” Shiro says. An admission. 

“You don’t have to be good at these things,” Keith says. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll be here with you. No matter what.” 

Shiro opens his eyes and looks up at Keith again. His mouth is unsmiling, his eyes serious. But there’s something so endlessly giving there, welcoming, warm. Desperately fond. Unconditionally caring. 

He can’t keep it tied down anymore. 

“I love you,” Shiro says. 

And then, Keith smiles. He smiles and shifts forward so that his arms are around Shiro’s neck, that he’s tipped forward against him, pulling Shiro’s head into his chest. Shiro gets the honor of feeling Keith’s warmth envelop him, to hear the slow, steady pounding of his heart against his ear. 

“I love you too,” Keith replies. 

There’s wet in Shiro’s eyes again. There’s something buzzing between his skin and his muscles, living in his throat and his lungs. Part of him is always going to feel like he doesn’t deserve this, he knows. Part of him is always going to rebel against the idea of happiness. 

But here with his cheek pressed to Keith’s chest, feeling the way Keith gently lowers his head to bury his nose into Shiro’s hair, he knows he wants to spend the rest of his life atoning for the ways he’s hurt this man. And if this is what Keith wants, if Keith is so willing and eager to look past Shiro’s shortcomings and embrace him and love him, then Shiro knows that depriving himself of this isn’t just a punishment on himself. 

Suddenly, Keith’s body shudders against him, and with a jolt of panic, Shiro pulls back. 

“Sorry,” Keith says, dipping his head so that his bangs swing in front of his eyes. He half turns away as he drags the back of his wrist across his face. 

“ _ Keith _ ,” Shiro says, and grabs that same forearm with his flesh and blood hand as Keith’s teeth sink into his bottom lip, fighting back against a second sob that wracks his body. 

Instinctively, Shiro pulls Keith down against him, folding him into his lap. Keith gives a motion as if to resist at first, but then goes easy, letting himself be tugged against Shiro’s chest, his head  _ thumping _ against his shoulder, his legs lifted and tucked into him so that Shiro can envelop him completely in his arms. 

“What’s wrong?” Shiro asks, thumbing across Keith’s cheekbones. “Talk to me.”

Shiro’s never seen Keith cry before. In all the time he’s known him. In everything that they’ve been through, he’s never seen Keith’s forehead crumple like this, or the way that tears thicken his eyelashes. 

“I didn’t think—.” He pauses to fight down a sob. “I didn’t think you’d ever say it to me.”

This is not the time to give into self-loathing, so Shiro doesn’t. Suddenly, it seems so simple to put it aside when it’s for this beautiful creature in his arms. 

“What? ‘I love you’?” he says. “I’ll say it again. I’ll say it again every day for the rest of my life, Keith. I love you.” He tilts Keith’s chin up and looks into his red-rimmed eyes. “I love you.”

The truth of it fills him with its fire, and suddenly he can’t hold Keith tight enough. He lets him cry it out against his shoulder, and feels the relief of this moment be shared in the warmth of their bodies. 

There’s no going back now, Shiro realizes with a burst of joy in his chest. He can’t take this back. He can’t pretend it was an accident. He can only fall harder and harder with Keith. He can only take the love he’s harbored quietly inside of him for so long and let it flow out into the world. 

“Thank you, Shiro,” Keith says wetly against his neck. 

In response, Shiro leans in and kisses Keith’s cheeks, where the tears have left damp trails. He kisses over Keith’s eyelids, tasting the salt on his lips. He kisses Keith’s nose, the bridge of it, and then its perfect point. 

And then his lips are hovering over Keith’s again, the space between them magnetized, electrified, but dwindling. 

Keith closes it, and his presence, his scent, his warmth, absolutely consumes him. 

Kissing, the act, the feeling, the placement of tongues and teeth and lips, is a completely different experience with everyone. With Adam, Shiro was always tentative, gentle, like something between them was going to break if he pushed too hard. With Curtis there was a lot of passion and very little finesse, often leaving Shiro with lips bruised and bitten, until they suddenly stopped one day and never picked it up again. Shiro has kissed dozens of men throughout his life, but not a single one of them ever felt like this.

This is deep, full, right from the start. It begins with a tender press of lips and unfolds into a wildfire. Keith clings to his front with both hands like he’s scared Shiro will float away; Shiro changes his angle as if to tell him that he’s here for life. And he hopes that’s what Keith can gather through the way that Shiro is putting his mouth on him. The way that Shiro is gently cupping his jawline and rubbing a thumb along it while opening up for him, for his tongue and his teeth, letting him take whatever he wants. 

Shiro’s been waiting years for this. It feels like centuries. Since the day he saw Keith in the bar, since the day the divorce went through, since the day Shiro kissed him before his wedding. Since Keith held him in his arms after his consciousness had finally been accepted by this body. Since the day Keith stepped off the Altean pod older, more handsome. Since the day outside of Keith’s shack the morning after Shiro had first crash-landed back on Earth, and Keith had been there. 

Shiro never wants to have to wait for this again. It’s too  _ good _ . The pleased, quiet sound Keith makes in the back of his throat. The way Keith’s lips fit against his. The way his tongue moves, the way he tastes. The breath that flows through him. Shiro can feel his pulse when he moves his hand down to his neck and thumbs at his carotid, and it’s lovely and rapid and real. 

When Shiro shifts Keith on his thigh, Keith hums into the kiss, and Shiro needs to pull back, just for a minute. He suddenly feels dizzy, overwhelmed. He didn’t ever think he would feel this light, buoyant, happy. Never again in his life.

“We should, uh,” Shiro says, reluctant to speak, more than a little out of breath, “maybe catch up with the others.”

Keith grins. He shuts his eyes and presses his forehead to Shiro’s again, and then swoops in for one last kiss. Then he climbs off Shiro’s lap to his feet, brushing himself off, and Shiro immediately misses the warmth of him. 

“Yeah,” Keith says, breathing a laugh. “Let’s go.”

More or less returned to his full strength, Shiro reaches forwards and grabs full onto the controls of the Black Lion. With his touch, she powers back on, basking them in her purple light. 

Just before he steers them onwards, something makes him look up over his shoulder towards Keith. Of course, Keith is already looking at him. Of course, it’s with an expression like he’s watching the stars. Of course, his mouth is curved into the gentlest smile. Of course, his eyes are soft and full of love. 

“What?” Shiro asks him, fighting off the way his chest sparks to life with an energy, a lightness, he’s never felt before in his life. His stomach is full of a floating warmth. The smile that spreads across his face is instinctive, unconscious, and feels so good. 

“Nothing,” Keith says, though he doesn’t look away, and he doesn’t stop smiling. 

Shiro keeps that smile close in his mind, tucks it against the thundering of his heart in his chest. He turns back towards the stars in front of him, and they fly. 

* * *

The first thing Shiro notices when they catch up to the others is the hulking mass of the Yellow Lion.

“Shiro! Keith!” Hunk hails them over the comms, and he’s bathed in a yellow light that can only mean one thing. His joy is written clear across his face. “Check it out!”

“Nice job, Hunk,” Shiro says, and is surprised by how steady and strong his voice comes out. He feels like the tone of it is one he hasn’t heard in a while, and he’s missed it. 

“What took you guys so long?” Lance asks from his own cockpit. 

Shiro and Keith exchange an amused look, and apparently that’s enough to draw a dry cough and a too-knowing smile from Pidge. 

Despite their positive roll, everyone is tired. They collectively decide it’s better to get some rest than to push onwards. There’s a shared buzz in all of them. With only one Lion left to find, they know it’s not an accident that the one who’s stayed hidden from them until now is the one that Allura piloted. It’s an invigorating thought. 

Shiro is unsure of his footing when he stands up beside Keith, but Keith appears to be waiting for him, still and open as he looks up into Shiro’s face. On instinct, without missing a beat, Shiro raises his arms and wraps them around him. Under his arms, Shiro can feel the breath go into him, out of him, and then Keith returns the embrace, his nose finding its way against Shiro’s neck and nuzzling in. It feels like everything Shiro has always wanted. 

“Come to bed with me,” Shiro says against Keith’s hair. 

Keith huffs out a breath of laughter, or a sigh of tired satisfaction. “I’m exhausted, Shiro.” 

“No, just....” Shiro can’t help himself. He places his lips to Keith’s forehead, breathes in his earthy scent. He doesn’t want to let go, not now and not ever. So when he takes the step back from Keith, he keeps their palms pressed together, and uses their linked fingers to pull Keith into the back and towards his cot with him. 

Despite his protest, Keith gives himself over to Shiro’s handling and goes down easy. Shiro arranges himself in the bed against the wall and tugs Keith in after him, dragging the blankets over both of them before clutching Keith against his chest. And then he just breathes. In, out, in, out. Keith is hot against him, and his blood is pumping and he’s breathing too and laying there, unmoving, is incredible. 

“I feel like I’m finally home,” Shiro admits. 

“Mmm,” Keith agrees, low and rich and luxuriant. He sounds pleased. 

But then he begins to squirm in Shiro’s arms, creating a space for himself, and there’s a moment in which Shiro fears he’s trying to break away, like maybe he really doesn’t want to be as close to Shiro as Shiro wants to be with him. But instead, Keith begins to wriggle out of his pants, sliding them off his body. Then his shirt, dragged up over his head, leaving his long hair tangled and mussed. Shiro can’t help but want to follow his lead, and begins kicking off his pants, scrambling to yank his shirt off, until he’s able to press himself to Keith and feel absolutely nothing between them. 

Keith’s bare skin against his own stirs some sense of passion in Shiro’s body, but more than anything, it feels safe. Comfortable. Warm. Like Shiro’s body and Keith’s body were meant to exist like this, to meet each other with nothing in the middle. Not only in a sexual way, though thoughts of that linger in the back of Shiro’s mind as his body grows soft and pliant with long-awaited satisfaction. But simply like they’re the natural continuation of each other.

It’s the last thought in Shiro’s mind as he begins to drift, Keith tucked against his chest. It’s where he belongs, Shiro decides. Not just now but for the rest of all time. 

* * *

Shiro’s awakening is different from every other morning so far in his life. He doesn’t come to with a sharp sense of dread, or some kind of alarm. There’s no intense stressor hanging over him, or a feeling like he’s misplaced something and he’ll have to figure out what it is before he can do anything else. There’s no immediate anxiety, nor does anything pressing rouse him.

Well, except for  _ that _ . 

But it’s not particularly insistent and Shiro ignores it for the time being in favor of letting himself be drowsily dragged to wakefulness by the warmth that’s still pressed against him. All down his front, he’s pressed to something soft and smooth and hot, and he tightens his arms around it just like he’s always dreamed of doing. His nose is in Keith’s hair, and he takes a lungful of his scent and basks in it. 

His chest glows with a warmth and a happiness he’d never imagined he’d possibly obtain. 

Keith’s breathing is still deep and rhythmic, so Shiro takes it as his personal responsibility to wake him. Though the visual of him sleeping peacefully against Shiro is gorgeous, there are things Shiro wants to do with Keith that he needs him awake for. 

Shiro kisses the side of Keith’s jaw, where he knows the scar he left is. And then he trails down Keith’s body, nose nuzzling against his neck, in the junction of his shoulders, until he’s reached Keith’s shoulder blade. And he leaves a kiss there too, right over his own words blazed in permanent ink under Keith’s skin. 

The rhythm of Keith’s breathing hitches, and Shiro chases it, pulls on the feeling in his heart until it leads him to thumb over the jut of Keith’s hipbone, sharp under smooth skin. The back of Shiro’s hand brushes against sprigs of coarse curls, but he draws away. There’s time for that later, and right now Shiro instead wants to reach the width of his outstretched fingers over Keith’s well-muscled stomach. He feels out the dip of his navel with his fingertips, and Keith inhales sharply. 

_ Ticklish, _ is the first thought that enters Shiro’s mind, but of course there’s time to learn and explore that later.

“Shiro,” Keith mumbles, muffled against the pillow and quiet with sleep. It sends a bolt of joy straight through Shiro’s chest to hear his own name said in such a voice, and he instinctively tightens his hold. 

“Good morning,” he replies, nosing behind Keith’s ear. 

And when Keith gives a shiver and a breathy little moan, Shiro knows he’s absolutely done for. 

Under his arm, Keith’s bare spine arches in a stretch. His legs brush against Shiro’s where he straightens them and sighs with the effort of it, rolling his shoulders back to rid himself of sleep stiffness. The way his body moves against Shiro’s isn’t inherently erotic, no more so than anything else Keith ever does, but Shiro is already near-brimming with desire just to feel him. 

Keith turns, sliding himself against Shiro, until they’re face to face and Shiro has no choice but to gaze into those thunderhead purple eyes, to get absolutely lost in them as Keith blinks the sleep away. Just when Shiro thinks he can’t be more in love, Keith draws forward to nuzzle in close, pressing a kiss to the bridge of Shiro’s nose, then his chin, and then, achingly languid, slow, careful, his lips. 

“How’d you sleep?” Shiro asks when they part, his mouth still tingling with the phantom of Keith’s teeth and tongue. 

“Great,” Keith says, and puts a hand against Shiro’s chest. He leaves it there for a long moment, his eyes downturned towards it, before he begins tracing the divots of Shiro’s muscles. His touch is reverant, in a way that Shiro finds both shocking and relatable. It’s strange to think that someone would find his hardened, battered body so worth feeling, but at the same time, Shiro wants to learn every inch of Keith with his fingertips as well. 

“I—,” Shiro starts, but in a fit of embarrassment snaps his mouth shut. 

Keith’s eyes are instantly on him. “What?” 

Looking away, smiling self-deprecatingly, Shiro strokes his knuckles down Keith’s spine. “Never mind. It’s nothing.” 

“No.” Keith jabs him in the stomach with a playful poke. “Now you have to tell me.”

Heat floods Shiro’s face, but he makes an attempt anyway. 

“I want to wake up this happy every morning for the rest of my life,” Shiro says, “and I feel like an idiot for not letting this happen sooner.”

Keith inhales, and Shiro wonders if he’s somehow overstepped. If despite everything, it’s possible for him to be too much in this situation. If by baring the depth and breadth of the way he feels about Keith, if by showing him his heart, he’ll sooner or later make him skitter away again. 

But then Keith’s lips meet his again, fierce and strong, before pulling away just to lay kisses to his chin, his cheeks, his throat. And Shiro is forced to remember that Keith is the man who threw himself into space for him. Keith is the man who crossed the entire universe for him. 

“It wasn’t just you, you know,” Keith murmurs. “I called you my brother. There were so many places I went wrong.”

“Keith, that’s—” 

“I think about it every day,” Keith admits into the underside of Shiro’s jaw. “What we could’ve been if I had said yes. When you asked me to run away with you.”

The words sink into Shiro’s skin like shrapnel, and the scene unfolds in front of him behind his eyelids. Keith grinning and taking his hand. The two of them, together, sneaking aboard a small Garrison ship, the berth just barely big enough for the pair of them. Disappearing into the night’s black expanse until it surrounded them completely, stars glimmering on all sides. How the entire universe could have been their playground, flitting from planet to planet just out of the reach of the prying eyes of everyone they left behind. They would’ve spent their days as vigilantes, tearing down the last remaining pockets of the empire and their nights as just two people in the fast universe, twined together, all hands and mouths and hearts. 

“I’m sorry I didn’t,” Keith says, like a sigh. 

But realistically, Shiro knows they never would have made it out of there. The offer had been given in a moment of unparalleled weakness. All his fantasies about what could have followed were just that. He knows he never would have been able to live with the guilt of leaving Curtis at the altar. He had thought he loved Curtis then, even with the way he was pulled irrevocably towards Keith. He would have felt like he owed a goodbye, at least. And a goodbye would have become an explanation, an explanation would have become an apology, an apology would have become months of Shiro trying to make up for his vast and innumerable shortcomings. 

“No,” says Shiro. “I’m sorry that I married someone else when I really only ever wanted you.”

It aches to admit, but it also feels good knowing that it’s behind him now. He holds Keith tighter and stares into his eyes, but Keith gives his shoulder a gentle shove.

“Enough apologies,” Keith says, and suddenly he’s rolling, and Shiro finds himself under him. Keith, like a dream, is sitting naked astride his hips. His hair is loose around his face and messy from a night against the pillow, and now Shiro’s cock aches. 

It’s not going to be a problem for long if Keith has his way, and he makes that tremendously clear by the way his hips start a slow, deliberate grind. Shiro moans at the contact, at the way Keith is unselfconsciously just as hard as he is, one hand running back through his hair and pushing it away from his face as he stares down into Shiro’s eyes. Shiro can hardly handle it, the look in his eye, the friction of his body, the sensual way he moves himself. 

“Keith,” says Shiro, his voice strained with want, and reaches up towards him. 

Keith comes down to him, keeping the roll of his hips steady, sliding their cocks against each other. All down Shiro’s front, Keith presses to him, hard muscle against hard muscle. He slots his mouth against Shiro’s like there’s venom in his veins and Shiro is the only antidote.

“How do you want me?” Keith asks earnestly when he pulls off, with a quiet eagerness straining at his voice. It takes Shiro’s breath away, the words, the way he says it, the look shining in his eyes, as though he truly has been desperately desiring him for as long as Shiro has been wanting Keith. It’s heart-stopping to Shiro that they’re here, sharing this bed, sharing these kisses, and for the first time ever Shiro has the opportunity to learn how Keith’s body responds to his hands. 

Shiro knows that whatever he says next, Keith will happily accept, and while that thought would have once filled him with fear, right now he chooses to be grateful. He makes a decision.

“Inside of me,” he says, dragging his thumb along Keith’s fine jawbone. “I want you inside of me.”

Desires flares in Keith’s face like gasoline-fed flames; Shiro knows it was the right thing to say. Keith scrambles off of him and glances around the space, as though expecting the answer to his mental search to spontaneously appear before him. 

“The inside pocket of my bag,” Shiro says, grinning. It had seemed silly at the time of slipping it in there, but he’s never been more happy to be prepared for any situation. He’s treated to the sight of Keith’s lithe body hurrying to where Shiro’s bag is slumped against the wall, the incredible view that Keith presents to him when he bends at the waist to rifle through the pockets. 

He comes back triumphant and smiling to prove it, brandishing the small bottle in his hands, already clicking open the top to drizzle the contents over his fingers. 

Shiro, feeling spectacularly unashamed despite the situation, returns his smile, lifts his hips, and parts his thighs for him. Keith traces his eyes across his offering hungrily, the expression on his face falling into something heavier, darker, thrilled excitement mutating into unadulterated desire and want. It sends Shiro’s blood roaring through his veins, but also makes his chest squeeze. Keith wants him just as much as he wants Keith, and it’s painted in his eyes and the set of his mouth. 

“Do you want me to—” Shiro starts to offer as Keith’s slick fingers first touch him, causing his cock to twitch. 

But Keith shakes his head and carefully drags his fingers down, circling Shiro with a featherlight touch. 

“I know how to do this,” he says. 

Shiro frowns, and is about to ask who Keith has been doing this with, and why, and was it very good, and  _ who _ , but the intensity in Keith’s gaze is enough to stop him in his tracks. 

“I do it to myself sometimes. And think of what it’d be like with you.”

A finger breaches him, and Shiro’s breath is snatched away. He can’t fight the moan that pushes out of him. He thinks of Keith prodding the same finger into himself and almost needs to ask Keith to give him a minute just to breathe. 

But he pushes through, because the expression on Keith’s face is addictive. It’s awed, desirous, and triumphant in equal parts, in the passing moments, eyes wide and devouring where they trace along Shiro’s body, bottom lip pulled under the press of white teeth in concentration. Shiro can’t take his gaze away, not even as Keith slides a second finger in to join the first. 

“Okay?” he asks, voice low and warm and full of the crackle of fire. It spreads fast and catches in Shiro’s gut, and his eyelids flutter shut as Keith gently works him open.

Shiro nods, fast and hard, not trusting his voice to be anything but completely broken if he speaks. They’ve barely even started doing anything. Keith has yet to touch his cock (though he’s been eyeing it with increasing hunger). But there’s something about the entire situation that has Shiro too keyed up. It’s in the way that Keith is treating him with nothing but the tenderest care, completely attuned to his comfort and pleasure, while so obviously wanting in turn. 

But it shouldn’t come as a surprise. That’s the only way Keith has ever treated him, from the moment Shiro extended his hand out to him all those years and galaxies ago. 

Three fingers, and, “God, Shiro,” Keith murmurs, like he can’t help himself when he looks at him. And Shiro feels encompassed completely by the mixture of want and love that seems to be the very building blocks of his existence right now.

“Keith,” Shiro manages to get out in response, because it’s deserved when Keith looks like that, hair wild and loose like a mane around his beautifully-boned face, eyes dark and narrowed in concentration. 

He reaches further with his fingers, crooks them, thrusts them, and Shiro is seeing stars. 

“Please, Keith, I—” Shiro starts, but Keith shushes him gently, rubbing a comforting thumb on Shiro’s hipbone. 

“Almost,” he promises, working, working, and Shiro feels like he’s held together with nothing more than twine pulled close to fraying. He wonders if he could come from this alone, from Keith’s eyes burning him raw, from Keith’s thumb tracing the line of his hip, from Keith’s bare thigh propped under his own bare thigh, from Keith’s words, the sound of him breathing, his presence. 

He could, Shiro thinks. He absolutely could. 

But before he gets the chance to, and thankfully, as he wants more and more and more, Keith draws his hand out, cocks his head, and asks, “Ready?”

“ _ Please _ ,” Shiro begs. “Please, Keith.”

For a long moment, Keith’s eyes freeze on him, and Shiro thinks he’s lost him somehow. That suddenly Keith’s come back to himself, that Keith can’t possibly want this scarred and battered body, that Keith has realized everything that Shiro has put him through and decided he doesn’t want any more of it. 

But his mouth hangs open, and a whispered  _ wow _ makes it way out of him, and Shiro, skin already burning, feels himself flush from his chest to his hairline. 

“I love you,” he blurts, aching to be filled, slick between his thighs, Keith’s fingers dripping with lube and both their cocks bare and hard and wanting between them. 

“Fuck,” Keith replies, and scrambles to take himself in hand, and lines himself up. 

Shiro’s done this before, of course Shiro has done this before, and he’s familiar with the physical feelings. The stretch, the initial strangeness of something pushing in a way his body wasn’t necessarily designed for, the alien sensation. What he’s not used to is this: the way knowing that it’s Keith slowly sliding into him, avidly watching his face for signs of discomfort, makes his every cell sing. How feeling Keith filling in the gaps of him, inside him, around him, completing him, feels so  _ good _ and so  _ right _ that Shiro needs to grab for the first thing he comes in contact with. 

It’s Keith’s hand, and Keith breathes a surprised laugh as he adjusts their grip, slotting their fingers together. They both look to where their hands are joined on the bed, and then again into each other’s eyes, and though Keith’s smile is lopsided and his breath is coming through his mouth in shallow but controlled huffs, Shiro has never known anything so beautiful. 

“Are you okay?” Keith asks him. 

“Never been better,” Shiro says, his voice sounding impossibly strange and hoarse with want to his own ears. “Please, baby. Move.” 

“Okay,” Keith says. He takes a deep breath, leaning over Shiro’s body, and hovers there a moment as though to prepare himself. Unable to help himself, Shiro loops his legs around Keith’s back and tries to pull him somehow closer, and Keith fixes him with the breathtakingly determined look that Shiro loves so much it nearly shatters him. 

“Okay,” Keith says one more time, and draws back, just a little. 

When he shifts back in, gentle and loving, it’s not nearly enough but it already makes Shiro want to throw his head back against the lumpy pillow and moan.

The following thrusts, too, are testing, shallow. It feels good. It’s still not enough for much of anything, but Shiro immediately knows he’s going to be ruined for everything else for the rest of his life. Just because it’s Keith, because the way he looks at him and the little sounds he’s making and the way his hips meet Shiro’s leave him breathless. 

“Keith!” Shiro begs. 

Keith’s fingers squeeze against Shiro’s hand as he lowers himself closer to his body, his gaze still burning into Shiro’s face as he begins to pick up the pace. Under so many circumstances in his past, Shiro has found the whole staring into each other's eyes during sex thing almost uncomfortably intimate. There are times even Shiro doesn't want to feel like he’s seen. Like he’s the center of attention, like his marred body is on display. But with Keith, it feels beyond natural. Like their connection transcends just a part of Keith’s body inside of him, Keith’s hand in his. Like they can feel each other in more ways than the mere physical. 

It’s not an accident Shiro feels this way, he knows. He knows he’s connected to Keith through their bonds with the Black Lion, which buzzes around them with mounting frequency as Keith’s movements increase in speed. He can almost feel his pleasure, his joy, his love. But this is more than even that. This is wanting to connect with Keith in every rawest way. This is baring himself as he’s never bared himself to anyone else. 

If Shiro could find a way to wrest the pure quintessence from his soul, to hold it in his hands, to open up Keith’s chest and put it there alongside his and mix them together until they are no longer two separate beings but one singular lifeform, Shiro would do it in an instant. But for now this is the closest he can get, the most of Keith he can feel at any one given time, and he’s so thoroughly loving it that he feels choked by the intensity of this moment. He can’t help the sounds that come out of him.

He figures it’s okay, because Keith is making sounds too. Quiet, huffed little grunts on every thrust that eventually give way to the force of his accelerated breath, which, in its own time, gives way to speech. 

“Shiro,” Keith says, and says it again and again and again, like it’s the only word he knows, until he can manage to form the words, “You feel so good, Shiro.  _ Fuck _ .”

Shiro moans at that because he has to. There’s no other way to let out the feeling in his chest. Not when he knows that Keith is feeling as good as he’s making Shiro feel right now, with every driving snap of his hips. He’s still getting faster, growing harder, and Shiro wants all of it. Wants every inch of him, every sound, every breath, every accelerated heartbeat. 

“Keith,” Shiro replies. “More,  _ more _ ,” he begs, because it feels so amazing he’s willing to take everything that Keith is willing to offer him. Keith leans in further, presses his mouth, open and wet, against Shiro’s. It’s sloppy and barely even a kiss but Shiro finds that panting into Keith’s mouth is somehow just as incredible as staring into his eyes. 

It rises in him, and though Shiro wants to fight the sensation, wants to draw out this moment with all the strength in him if just to keep feeling Keith, to keep being with him like this. But he also wants to embrace it. He wants Keith to take him, drive him over the edge. He wants to come apart in Keith’s arms and pull Keith with him. 

He reaches for Keith mentally. Like a beam of light Keith is there, warming him, filled with pleasure and happiness. He’s close, and Shiro is close too, and he knows if they’re going to do this how they both want to do this, it’s going to have to happen soon. 

Shiro snakes a hand between them and wraps it around himself. He moans with the touch of it, but it’s nothing compared to where Keith is driving against something hot and sparking inside of him. It barely even takes a touch to make Shiro’s entire body sing, not when Keith is looking at him like that, his own end rocketing towards him, his hair plastered to his forehead with sweat, his lips in the shape of Shiro’s name. 

“Keith, I’m—”

“Me too,” Keith says. “ _ Shiro _ !”

His palm is pressed flat against Shiro’s, and his hand squeezes tight. 

Shiro’s orgasm feels like the air punched out of his lungs. Tingling waves wash down through his thighs. He rocks with what’s left of Keith’s thrusts, and lets himself be carried away by it. A moan tears itself out of him, and his eyes roll back, and his back arches off the mattress, and all he can think about is  _ keithkeithkeith. _ His body is too hot all over, slick with sweat and bursting with the greatest feeling Shiro’s ever known, both physical and emotional. 

He lies back and tries to grasp at what’s left of his collectedness, but it slips through his fingers. Shiro has never been so happy to see it go. He breathes.

“Shiro,” Keith says, when Shiro can comprehend sounds again, his voice hoarse. “You’re crying again.” 

It takes Shiro a few breaths to register the words, and then a few more to realize that it’s true. That there’s something wet against his cheeks, that the blurriness in his eyes is more than just the remnants of the haze of pleasure that he lost himself in. That the reason Keith is caressing his cheeks, thumbs brushing against the skin, is because he’s wiping Shiro’s tears away. 

“Sorry,” Shiro says, cracking a smile. “I’m happy.”

Next thing Shiro knows, Keith’s shadow is overtaking his vision. He closes his eyes, and Keith kisses over his cheeks, over his eyes, over the scar that slashes across his nose. 

“Don’t apologize,” Keith murmurs against his temple, and holds Shiro tight against his chest. 

After a few moments, Shiro’s breathing finally evens out, and his tears stop flowing, and he is flooded with the most comfortable, happiest feeling he’s ever known in his life. Nothing has ever felt this good. 

“Want to hear something weird?” Shiro says, letting himself soak in the glow. 

“Yeah,” Keith replies. His voice is still raspy, but sated, quiet, low. Shiro wonders if anyone else has ever heard this voice. He wants to wrap himself in it. 

“Curtis never let me do that,” Shiro says. 

Keith stiffens against him. “What? Be on the bottom?”

Shiro laughs and jostles Keith a bit, pulling him in closer. “Yeah. It was strange.”

“That’s stupid.” Keith rolls and picks up his head so that he can look Shiro in the face. “You won’t have that problem with me.”

“Oh yeah?” Shiro smiles, and is thrilled to see the responding grin unfold on Keith’s face.

“Yeah, as long as you return the favor sometimes.”

“Whenever you want, baby.”

“Right now?” 

Shiro laughs. “How about in half an hour.”

The ringing of the comms slices through the serenity and coziness of their embrace. Keith groans. 

“Guess we’ve gotta put clothes on,” Keith says, sounding more petulant than Shiro has ever heard him. It brings a smile to his face. 

“I do want to get cleaned up,” he says. “And the others are probably wondering where we are.”

“As if they don’t know,” Keith scoffs, but rolls away from Shiro anyway, sliding out of the bed and scrounging around on the floor for the clothes he discarded there yesterday. Shiro definitely doesn’t mind watching him bend to grab his pants, and when he rolls them up over his long, shapely legs it’s somehow just as sensual as watching him take them must be. 

As he passes, he tosses a cloth to Shiro, who is content to lounge in bed as he lets Keith do all the work, and promises, “I’ll help clean you up after I let Lance know we’re gonna be another few minutes.”

And he does keep his word on that, returning to gently wipe the remains of himself from Shiro’s thighs in a slow, careful, tender way that almost has Shiro quivering with need again. 

But there’s time for that later. There’s all the time in the universe. Shiro feels himself glow with that knowledge. 

When they both manage to find their way into the cockpit, Shiro happily aching in his lower back, Keith takes the pilot’s seat and flicks on the comms. 

Three other Paladins are grinning back at them, lit in the colors of three other Lions. It feels like looking at a puzzle with all of the pieces assembled to create the perfect picture except one. Shiro is proud, excited, pleased about how far they’ve come, and eager to finish doing what they need to do. 

“Nice of you to join us, Shiro,” says Pidge smugly, with a grin that says she knows exactly why Shiro took so long to get out of bed. 

Shiro allows her, and all of them with their smirks and raised eyebrows, a sheepish smile, but decides there’s time for crude ribbing later. Right now, there’s someone they need to find. 

“What’s the plan for today?” he asks. 

“We’re gonna get Allura!” Lance replies cheerfully.

“Got a read on her?” Keith asks, powering up the engines. 

“I think she’s going somewhere,” Pidge says. “We’ve tracked her across half the universe at this point. She must have some kind of end goal.” 

“Well, where is it?” Shiro asks. 

Pidge transmits a map of their recent route to the view screens of the other crafts, and there’s a collective gasp. 

Shiro traces the path with his eyes. From the far-flung starfield where they first began their search, across a vast swath of galaxies and solar systems, between planets and suns, through asteroid fields and Xanthorium clusters. It’s a strangely straight line, with a trajectory clear and easily traceable to everyone’s eyes. They can extrapolate her tail until the planets become recognizable, until the stars have names that Shiro memorized out of a book he read when he was in grade school. Streaking into a barred spiral galaxy, past the moons of Pluto, past the rings of Saturn, through the asteroid belt. 

“Earth,” says Lance, breathless. “She’s going to Earth.”

“She’s looking for you,” Keith says. 

“She’s looking for  _ us _ ,” Lance replies. 

**Author's Note:**

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